Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories

Korean writer Choe Myngik was a lifelong resident of Pyongyang, a city his short stories masterfully evoke in exquisite modernist prose. His career spanned decades of tumult, from his debut in the 1930s while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule through the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars and the early years of the Democratic Peoples Republic. As Pyongyang transformed from Koreas second city, peripheral to the Seoul-centered literary scene, into a socialist capital in the late 1940s, Choe briefly ascended to the center of North Korean culture. Despite the vitality and originality of Choes writing, Cold War politics and censorship, including South Koreas anticommunist laws, consigned his work to obscurity. Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories presents a selection of Choes short fiction in translation, including later works from hard-to-find North Korean publications. These cinematic, keenly observed tales explore Pyongyang in meticulous detail, depicting the citys transformations and the conflicts between old and new. They pay close attention to the lives of the disaffected and the marginalized: a drifter confronts a former revolutionary dying of opium addiction; a sex worker is trafficked across the border aboard a train, amid the indifference of her fellow passengers. Later stories provide a striking glimpse of the Korean Warthe occupation of Pyongyang, U.S. fighter jets bombing civilian refugees, guerrilla heroicsfrom a North Korean perspective. Hidden treasures of world literature, these stories offer new perspectives on Koreas turbulent twentieth century, across political divides still in place today.