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.

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio

Traducción del chino por Laura A. Rovetta y Laureano Ramirez.
Cuentos de Liao Zhai fueron escritos en el s.XVII. Relatos fantásticos chinos. Pu Songling recrea un mundo de espectros, animales, espíritus, sabios, demonios, magos que conviven con los mortales añadiendo una dimensión crítica al cuento clásico. Esta edición incluye 105 de los 474 que forman el original, además de 2 apéndices y 3 leyendas tradicionales chinas.

Cuentos de Liao Zhai

The weird and whimsical short stories in Strange Tales from Liaozhai show their author, Pu Songling (1640-1715), to be both an explorer of the macabre, like Edgar Allan Poe, and a moralist, like Aesop. In this first complete translation of the collection's 494 stories into English, readers will encounter supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhist and Daoist spirituality, and a wide range of Chinese folklore. Annotations are provided to clarify unfamiliar references or cultural allusions, and introductory essays have been included to explain facets of Pu Songling's work and to provide context for some of the unique qualities of his uncanny tales. This is the first of 6 volumes.

Strange Tales from Liaozhai - Vol. 1

'...revealing great shining fangs more than three inches long.' Some of the most macabre and wonderful of all Chinese stories, including 'The Golden Goblet', 'Scorched Moth the Daoist' and 'The Black Beast' Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Pu Songling (1640-1715). Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is available in Penguin Classics.

Wailing Ghosts

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 classic collection of eerie and fantastic Chinese stories of the supernatural

The weird and whimsical short stories in Strange Tales from Liaozhai show their author, Pu Songling (1640-1715), to be both an explorer of the macabre, like Edgar Allan Poe, and a moralist, like Aesop. In this first complete translation of the collection's 494 stories into English, readers will encounter supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhist and Daoist spirituality, and a wide range of Chinese folklore. Annotations are provided to clarify unfamiliar references or cultural allusions, and introductory essays have been included to explain facets of Pu Songling's work and to provide context for some of the unique qualities of his uncanny tales.This is volume 5 of 6.

Strange Tales from Liaozhai - Vol. 5

A man flies onto a painting and has a romantic affair with a beauty in it. A Taoist monk punishes a stingy and mean pear seller by planting a pear tree that bears fruits in minutes before giving them away for free, all at the expense of the seller. A young scholar is delighted to find a lover of striking beauty, but only to find out later that it is actually an ugly ghost with a painted human skin … This ebook is a translation of forty fascinating stories of supernatural beings like ghosts and fox spirits from The Remarkable Stories Told at a Chinese Salon, one of the masterpieces in Chinese culture.

Selected Stories from The Remarkable Stories Told at a Chinese Salon (Liao Zhai Zhi Yi)

The Painted Skin

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.

Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio

Written during the early Qing Dynasty, "Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio" is a collection of nearly 500 mostly supernatural tales by Chinese author Pu Songling. The work, which was published posthumously sometime between 1740 and 1766, is comprised of stories varying in length. While the main characters of this book apparently are ghosts, foxes, immortals and demons, Pu Songling is more focused on the real life of commoners. Four main themes run throughout the book. The first is the author's complaint with the existing feudal system, which he finds to be unjust and skewed towards the elite. Secondly the author is concerned with the corruption that exists in the Imperial examination system. Thirdly the author shows his admiration of pure, faithful love between poor scholars and powerless women. And lastly is the overarching theme of morality for which Pu Songling intended "Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio" to be instructive towards bettering. This work of classical Chinese literature is translated here by Herbert A. Giles.

Pu Songling

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