Publisher's Synopsis
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.
