The Dreamer Wakes
10 best books like The Dreamer Wakes (Xueqin Cao): Beijing Coma, The Journey to the West, Volume 2, The Peony Pavilion: Mudan ting, The Plum in the Golden Vase Or, Chin P'Ing Mei: Volume Two: The Rivals, Dream of Ding Village, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Six Records of a Floating Life, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun, The Past and the Punishments
| Author | Ma Jian |
| ISBN | 0374110174 |
At once a powerful allegory of a rising China, racked by contradictions, and a seminal examination of the Tiananmen Square protests, Beijing Coma is Ma Jian’s masterpiece. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty, and deep rage, this extraordinary novel confirms his place as one of the world’s most...
The Journey to the West, Volume 2
| Author | Wu Cheng'en |
| ISBN | 0226971511 |
The Journey to the West, volume 2, comprises the second 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...
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 | Yan Lianke |
| ISBN | 0802119328 |
Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, and the subject of a bitter lawsuit between author and publisher, Dream of Ding Village is Chinese novelist Yan Lianke's most important novel to date. Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeply moving and beautifully written account of...
| Author | Wang Anyi |
| ISBN | 0231143427 |
Set in post-World War II Shanghai, "The Song of Everlasting Sorrow" follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao, a girl born of the "longtong," the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods.
Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao seeks...
| 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...
Six Records of a Floating Life
| Author | Shen Fu |
| ISBN | 0140444297 |
Six Records of a Floating Life (1809) is an extraordinary blend of autobiography, love story and social document written by a man who was educated as a scholar but earned his living as a civil servant and art dealer. In this intimate memoir, Shen Fu recounts the domestic and romantic joys of his marriage...
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...
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 | Li Bai |
| ISBN | 0140442723 |
Li Po (AD 701-62) and Tu Fu (AD 712-70) were devoted friends who are traditionally considered to be among China's greatest poets. Li Po, a legendary carouser, was an itinerant poet whose writing, often dream poems or spirit-journeys, soars to sublime heights in its descriptions of natural scenes and...
| Author | Shi Nai'an |
| ISBN | 7119016628 |
China's great classic novel Outlaws of the Marsh, written in the fourteenth century, is a fictional account of twelfth-century events during the Song Dynasty. One by one, over a hundred men and women are forced by the harsh feudal officialdom to take to the hills. They band together and defeat every...
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 | A.C. Graham |
| ISBN | 1590172574 |
Classical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T'ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable...
| Author | Li Yu |
| ISBN | 0824817982 |
Timeless lessons to be learnt from this seventeenth century chinese erotic novel operating within a Buddhist framework featuring a scholar whose desire for a more fabulous sex life leads him to have a dog's penis spliced into his own, numerous women of various social classes, aggrieved husbands,...
| Author | Sima Qian |
| ISBN | 0231081693 |
Das Geschichtswerk des antiken China
Das "Shi Ji", hier als "Records of the Grand Historian" präsentiert, ist mit die wichtigste Quelle für Informationen über das antike China vor und während der Han-Dynastie. Ganz gemäß dem Temperament der konfuzianischen Chinesen mit ihrer Vergangenheitsfixierung...
| 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...
