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Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not
used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad
quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are
images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to
keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the
original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain
imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made
available for future generations to enjoy.
Long considered a masterpiece of the eerie and fantastic, Strange
Tales from a Chinese Studio is a collection of supernatural-themed
tales compiled from ancient Chinese folk stories by Songling Pu in
the eighteenth century. These tales of ghosts, magic, vampirism,
and other things bizarre and fantastic are an excellent Chinese
companion to Lafcadio Hearn's well-known collections of Japanese
ghost stories Kwaidan and In Ghostly Japan. Already a true classic
of Chinese literature and of supernatural tales in general, this
new edition of the Herbert A. Giles translation converts the work
to Pinyin for the first time and includes a new foreword by
Victoria Cass that properly introduces the book to both readers of
Chinese literature and of hair-raising tales best read with the
lights turned low on a quiet night. Some of the stories found in
these pages include: The Tiger of Zhaocheng The Magic Sword Miss
Lianziang, the Fox-Girl The Quarrelsome Brothers The Princess Lily
A Rip Van Winkle The Resuscitated Corpse Taoist Miracles A Chinese
Solomon
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.
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.
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