Böcker av Pu Songling

The Strange Tales of Pu Songling (1640-1715) are exquisite and amusing miniatures that are regarded as the pinnacle of classical Chinese fiction. With their elegant prose, witty wordplay and subtle charm, the 104 stories in this selection reveal a world in which nothing is as it seems. Here a Taoist monk conjures up a magical pear tree, a scholar recounts his previous incarnations, a woman out-foxes the fox-spirit that possesses her, a child bride gives birth to a thimble-sized baby, a ghostly city appears out of nowhere and a heartless daughter-in-law is turned into a pig. In his tales of humans coupling with shape-shifting spirits, bizarre phenomena, haunted buildings and enchanted objects, Pu Songling pushes back the boundaries of human experience and enlightens as he entertains.

Pu Songling (1640-1715), of the Qing Dynasty, wrote a total of 498 romantic short stories in classic Chinese during 40 years. This is a great miracle in the history of Chinese literature. The writer bravely exposed social contradictions and evils, severely criticized the false, the bad and the ugly, and highly praised the true, the good and the beautiful through his vivid stories about the ghosts, foxes, spirits, monsters, immortals and common people. Pu Songling has been known as "the King of Short Story" in the world together with French writer Guy de Maupassant and Russian writer Anton Chekhov. Lots of his stories have been adapted for films and TV series. His book has not only been widely renown in China, but also attracted many foreign readers. So far, there are more than twenty foreign versions for parts of these stories, including English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc. Among the famous Chinese classical books, this book has the most foreign language translations. Now Mr. Wang Chaolin and Miss. Wang Guanqun have ventured to translate all the stories from Pu Songling's work into English and then dedicated this complete translated version to the reading public.

A novelistic version of a love affair between a notorious emperor and an innocent courtesan, The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute enjoyed remarkable popularity throughout the Qing dynasty. Its author is one of China's most famous writers. This is the first translation of the work in any language.

Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio is a famous collection of about 500 short stories by Pu Songling (1640 - 1715), a writer of the Qing Dynasty. Fifty-one stories are selected for this English edition. These stories cover a wide range of subjects, such as werefoxes and fish spirits and ghosts and monsters that are personified. Like human beings, they have feelings of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, love and hatred as well as happiness and discontent. These mystical stories reflect the social life of the time in which they were written. Living under a feudal monarchy, the writer had to criticize the unfairness of the feudal system and express his indignation by writing of fox spirits and monsters. Although most of these stories are progressive and written with a critical slant, some of them still have ideas of feudal superstition and fatalism. The stories in Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio are written in simple and straightforward language, but they are highly structured with complicated plots that often employ the technique of combining illusion with reality. Some of these stories are based on popular folk legends and thus have a plain, folksy style. The ideological and artistic achievements of Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio have greatly influenced later novels and operas.