The Classic of Mountains and Seas
10 best books like The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Anonymous): Journey to the West, Volume 4, The Peony Pavilion: Mudan ting, The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei: Vol. One: The Gathering, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, I Love Dollars And Other Stories of China, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, The Book of Songs: The Ancient Chinese Classic of Poetry, Stick Out Your Tongue, Five Spice Street
Journey to the West, Volume 4
| Author | Wu Cheng'en |
| ISBN | 0226971546 |
The Journey to the West, volume 4, comprises the last twenty-five chapters of Anthony C. Yu's four-volume translation of Hsi-yu Chi, one of the most beloved classics of Chinese literature. The fantastic tale recounts the sixteen-year pilgrimage of the monk Hsüan-tsang (596-664), one of China's...
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...
| Author | Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng |
| ISBN | 0691016143 |
This first of five planned volumes begins David Roy's long-awaited complete and annotated translation of an anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel, the famous Chin P'ing Mei. A work known primarily for its erotic realism, the Chin P'ing Mei is also a landmark in the development of narrative art...
Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
| Author | Yu Hua |
| ISBN | 1400031850 |
One of the last decade's ten most influential books in China, this internationally acclaimed novel by one of the mainland's most important contemporary writers provides an unflinching portrait of life under Chairman Mao.
A cart-pusher in a silk mill, Xu Sanguan augments his meager salary...
| Author | Pu Songling |
| ISBN | 0140447407 |
The title, and the fact that this is a Penguin classic, attracted me. I really, really enjoyed this read. The stories were quite short, some only a paragraph in length, and the longest ones being perhaps 4-5 pages. And they were strange indeed, strange is definitely an understatement. They were very...
I Love Dollars And Other Stories of China
| Author | Zhu Wen |
| ISBN | 0231136943 |
In five richly imaginative novellas and a short story, Zhu Wen depicts the violence, chaos, and dark comedy of China in the post-Mao era. A frank reflection of the seamier side of his nation's increasingly capitalist society, Zhu Wen's fiction offers an audaciously plainspoken account of the often...
The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun
| Author | Xun Lu |
| ISBN | 0140455485 |
Lu Xun (1881—1936) is one of the founding figures of modern Chinese literature. His celebrated short stories assemble a powerfully unsettling portrait of the superstition, poverty, and complacence that he perceived in late-imperial China, and in the revolutionary Republic that toppled the...
| 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 | Ma Jian |
| ISBN | 0374269882 |
Tibet is a land lost in the glare of politics and romanticism, and Ma Jian set out to discover its truths. Stick Out Your Tongue is a revelation: a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet, both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and violent, seductive and perverse.
In this profound work of fiction,...
| Author | Can Xue |
| ISBN | 0300122276 |
Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22. Some...
Quite a treasury. I liked the numerous short fables even better than the stories. And the introduction, that gives just a bit of historical context, esp. re the rivalry between the Confucians and the Taoists, is helpful.
My favorite is one of the very shortest:
"The Missing Axe
"A...
| Author | Hartmann von Aue |
| ISBN | 3110160846 |
Note: As with the translation of Erec, I didn't actually read J.W. Thomas' translation, but his is likely to be good, in my experience.
Iwein is a translation/reinterpretation of Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, with a significant amount of lines added, though the plot is more or less the same....
The wisdom and artistry of Latin America's storytellers preserve one of the world's richest folktale traditions—combining the lore of medieval Europe, the ancient Near East, and pre-Columbian America. Among the essential characters are the quiet man's wife who knew the Devil's secrets, the...
| Author | Inea Bushnaq |
| ISBN | 0394751795 |
While containing a broad sampling of folktales from the Arab people, there are a few problems that consistently bothered me about this book. The author, in her commentary, claims that "the true Arab is the desert nomad," an idea which folklorist Dwight Reynolds has said is culturally inaccurate 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 | Pseudo-Callisthenes |
| ISBN | 0140445609 |
Mystery surrounds the parentage of Alexander, the prince born to Queen Olympias. Is his father Philip, King of Macedonia, or Nectanebo, the mysterious sorcerer who seduced the queen by trickery? One thing is certain: the boy is destined to conquer the known world. He grows up to fulfil this prophecy,...
| Author | Publius Papinius Statius |
| ISBN | 0801886368 |
A classical epic of fratricide and war, the Thebaid retells the legendary conflict between the sons of Oedipus Polynices and Eteocles for control of the city of Thebes. The Latin poet Statius reworks a familiar story from Greek myth, dramatized long before by Aeschylus in his tragedy Seven against...
| Author | Jin Yong |
| ISBN | 0195907272 |
In the Book and Sword, Louis Cha revives the legend about the great eighteenth-century Manchu Emperor Qianlong which claims that he was in fact not a Manchu but a Han Chinese as a result of a "baby swap." The novel is panoramic in scope and includes the fantastical elements for which Cha is well-known:...
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Vol 1: From Earliest Times to 1600
| Author | William Theodore de Bary |
| ISBN | 0231109393 |
A collection of seminal primary readings on the social, intellectual, and religious traditions of China, "Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 1" has been widely used and praised for almost forty years as an authoritative resource for scholars and students and as a thorough and engaging introduction...
Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man
| Author | Jonathan D. Spence |
| ISBN | 0670063576 |
A renowned historian captures a critical moment in Chinese history
Zhang Dai is recognized as one of the finest historians and essayists of China’s Ming dynasty. When he was born into a wealthy family in 1597, the Ming dynasty had been in place for 229 years. Zhang’s early life was marked...
China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
Additional. I knew I didn't do justice to this book. I'm on page 18 of a second read and have no notion why I didn't five-star this. Fixed.
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I'm giving this a second read.
He argues for 'human agency' in history, and feels that previous history, of the steppe and China -- specific to...
Three Kingdoms (Volume 1 of 3)
| Author | Luo Guanzhong |
| ISBN | 7119016644 |
Three Kingdoms is a classic historical novel. It was also the first Chinese novel with each chapter headed by a couplet giving the gist of the content. It describes the power struggles among the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu, headed by Cao Cao, Liu Bei and Sun Quan, respectively, in the period known to Chinese...
