Pu Songling – författare

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.

The Hsu-Tang Library presents authoritative and eminently readable translations of classical Chinese literature, in bilingual editions, ranging across three millennia and the entire Sinitic world.The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute by one of China's most famous authors builds on earlier dramatic works that had been inspired by the antics and travels of the Zhengde emperor (posthumous title Wuzong; r. 1506-1521) of the Ming dynasty. The Zhengde emperor was, despite his reign title ("Right Virtue"), a dismal failure as emperor. His life was given over to the pursuit of pleasure. When in Beijing he often left the palace in disguise and roamed the city incognito. He also made several long and elaborate trips to other parts of the empire, for instance one to Nanjing and Yangzhou, and one to the cities of Datong and Taiyuan in Shanxi. While these historical trips might have had a certain military purpose, the popular imagination saw them as informed by a search for beautiful women. In alternating prose and song, The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute tells the tale of the emperor setting out for Datong in the disguise of a common soldier after his evil genius Jiang Bin has told him about the beauty of the three thousand courtesans in the red-light district of this garrison town. This volume presents a fully annotated translation of all twenty-eight chapters of the work, preceded by an Introduction that provides context to the life and works of Pu Songling, the genre of "rustic songs" to which the work belongs, and the specific characteristics of the translated text.

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 ZhaochengThe Magic SwordMiss Lianziang, the Fox-GirlThe Quarrelsome BrothersThe Princess LilyA Rip Van WinkleThe Resuscitated CorpseTaoist MiraclesA Chinese Solomon