Book description
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 (1645-1715) was a poor, undistinguished
scholar who had an uneventful life. He took the lowest degree, the
bachelor's, before he was twenty, but ten years later, he still had not
succeeded in passing the second, the master's degree, due to his neglect
of the standard fields of academic study. His loss of personal status is
the world's gain, however, because his overriding interest was in tales
of the supernatural, and his collected works, the bible of Chinese
supernatural folktales.
