The Carnal Prayer Mat
10 best books like The Carnal Prayer Mat (Li Yu): The Peony Pavilion: Mudan ting, The Plum in the Golden Vase Or, Chin P'Ing Mei: Volume Two: The Rivals, The Debt of Tears, The Past and the Punishments, Fortress Besieged, The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry, The Peach Blossom Fan, The Rice Sprout Song, The King of Trees: Three Novellas: The King of Trees, The King of Chess, The King of Children, The She-Devils
The Peony Pavilion: Mudan ting
| Author | Tang Xianzu |
| ISBN | 0253215277 |
The celebrated English translation of this classic work of Chinese literature is now available in an updated paperback edition. Written in 1598 by Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion is one of literature's most memorable love stories and a masterpiece of Ming drama. It's heroine, Bridal Du, is a cloistered...
The Plum in the Golden Vase Or, Chin P'Ing Mei: Volume Two: The Rivals
| Author | Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng |
| ISBN | 0691126194 |
In this second of a planned five-volume series, David Roy provides a complete and annotated translation of the famous Chin P'ing Mei, an anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel that focuses on the domestic life of His-men Ch'ing, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains...
| Author | Xueqin Cao |
| ISBN | 0140443711 |
"The Story of the Stone" (c. 1760), also known by the title of "The Dream of the Red Chamber", is the great novel of manners in Chinese literature. Divided into five volumes, of which "The Debt of Tears" is the fourth, it charts the glory and decline of the illustrious Jia family (a story which closely accords...
The Past and the Punishments
| Author | Yu Hua |
| ISBN | 0824818172 |
To travel through these stories is to cross a landscape of stunning beauty and terrific cruelty, where expectations are subverted, where moral certainties are shattered, where gorgeously wrought surfaces beguile at the same time that acts of incredible brutality horrify.
It...
| Author | Qian Zhongshu |
| ISBN | 0811215520 |
Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, our hapless hero Fang Hung-chien (á la Emma Bovary), with no particular goal in life and with a bogus degree from a fake American university in hand, returns home to Shanghai. On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes,...
| Author | Arthur Waley |
| ISBN | 0802134777 |
One of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs (Shijing) is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and the finest treasure of traditional songs left from antiquity. Where the other Confucian classics treat “outward things: deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works,”...
| Author | Kong Shangren |
| ISBN | 1590178769 |
A tale of battling armies, political intrigue, star-crossed romance, and historical cataclysm, The Peach Blossom Fan is one of the masterpieces of Chinese literature, a vast dramatic composition that combines the range and depth of a great novel with the swift intensity of film.
In the mid-1640s,...
The first of Eileen Chang's novels to be written in English, The Rice-Sprout Song portrays the horror and absurdity that the land-reform movement brings to a southern village in China during the early 1950s. Contrary to the hopes of the peasants in this story, the redistribution of land does not mean...
When the three novellas in The King of Trees were published separately in China in the 1980s, “Ah Cheng fever” spread across the country. Never before had a fiction writer dealt with the Cultural Revolution in such Daoist-Confucian terms, discarding Mao-speak, and mixing both traditional and...
| Author | Pierre Louÿs |
| ISBN | 1596543620 |
Classic French erotica by the extremely prolific Louys. Susan Sontag, so recently deceased, described this book as one of the handful of erotic works that achieve true literary status. The She-Devils is the story of a young man who one day finds himself in the company of a family of whores - a mother and...
| Author | Red Pine |
| ISBN | 1556591950 |
Bilingual: Chinese/English
Poetry is China’s greatest art, and for the past eight centuries Poems of the Masters has been that country’s most studied and memorized collection of verse. For the first time ever in English, here is the complete text, with an introduction and extensive...
| Author | Xun Lu |
| ISBN | 9629961245 |
A towering figure in the literary history of twentieth-century China, Lu Xun has exerted significant and continuous influence through his short stories, which remain as powerful today as when first written. Echoes of these stories are audible in fiction from both sides of the Taiwan Strait.Like...
China has transfixed the West since the earliest contacts between these civilizations. With his characteristic elegance and insight, Jonathan Spence explores how the West has understood China over seven centuries. Ranging from Marco Polo's own depiction of China and the mighty Khan, Kublai, in...
| Author | Mark Edward Lewis |
| ISBN | 0674026055 |
After the collapse of the Han dynasty in the third century A.D., China divided along a north-south line. Mark Lewis traces the changes that both underlay and resulted from this split in a period that saw the geographic redefinition of China, more engagement with the outside world, significant changes...
| Author | Lao She |
| ISBN | 9629961253 |
Set in an old teahouse in Beijing, the play is typical of Lao She's art that seeks to provide a panoramic view of Chinese history and culture in their transformation from tradition to modernity. Teahouse spans fifty years in modern Chinese history from the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the Republican...
| Author | Wu Jingzi |
| ISBN | 7119012134 |
A masterpiece from the Ming dynasty, Wu Ching-tzu's The Scholars ranks with Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, and the Water Margin as one of the greatest classic novels of China. The Scholars is the first Chinese novel of its scope not to borrow any characters from history or legend and it is...
The Life of an Amorous Man
| Author | Saikaku Ihara |
| ISBN | 0804810699 |
First published in 1682, The Life of an Amorous Man depicts the pursuits and follies of the most glorious age of Japan, when wealthy commoners could rise above the warrior caste and indulge in the free and easy life of Japan's pleasure houses. The hero, Yonosuke, whose name means "Man of the World", is...
