In Chinese literary history, the Six Dynasties (317-588) and the T'ang (618-906) were the great creative times for the production of supernatural and fantastic stories in the classical language. This major collection of ninety-six stories, most of them newly translated, represents the very best of this tradition. These are all basically fictional narratives or stories, but unlike Western supernatural stories, are considered more or less as records of observable facts and have the effect of giving the fantastic a rootedness in historical reality. Underlying the recording of these supernatual stories is a belief in supernaturalism and magic and, above all, the acceptance of the unnatural and the supernormal on their face value as factual.

Chinese Ghost Stories offers a selection of entertaining Chinese tales of the fantastical and paranormal. Author Lafcadio Hearn had a great affinity for the traditional ghost stories of China, and these stories clearly inspired him as he penned subsequent works. Set in richly atmospheric locales, these tales speak of heroic sacrifice, chilling horror, eerie beauty and otherworldly intervention. The six ghost stories include: The Soul of the Great Bell The Story of Ming Yi The Legend of Zhi Nu The Return of Yan Zhenjing The Tradition of the Tea Plant The Tale of the Porcelain God This completely reset and pinyin-converted edition of Hearn's classic work contains a new foreword by Victoria Cass, which places the stories, their author, and his love for the strange and mysterious into perspective. If you're seeking insights into the traditional Chinese world of ghosts, goblins and demons--or just want to feel a chill run down your spine on a dark and lonely night--then this book is the perfect companion.

"This is the first complete translation into a Western language of Sou-shen Chi, a fourth-century Chinese collection of 464 extraordinary, fantastic, or bizarre items. The subjects of these brief anecdotes and narratives include natural curiosities, gods, religious figures, omens, dreams, divinations, miracles, monsters, strange animals, demons, ghosts, and exorcists. The stories range from sober reports of drought and misfortune to accounts of a fox transformed into a turtle, persons whose heads could take independent flight at night, a tryst in a tomb, and the marriages of humans with spirits." "Sou-shen Chi is the oldest, richest, and most consulted example of the chi-kuai genre, an important division of classical Chinese literature demonstrating features of narrative technique and ethereal sensibility that point to chi-kuai as the earliest examples of Chinese fiction. Of the three surviving versions of Sou-shen Chi, the 20-chapter edition translated here is widely accepted as the best representation of the work of its compiler, Kan Pao, the official court historian for Emperor Yuan of the Chin dynasty. The style of the writing is terse, almost austere, and it has qualities of documentary prose, a reflection of its common ancestry with historical writing. An introduction deals with the text and its background, authorship, contents, versions, and transmission." "Sou-shen Chi served as a model for subsequent collections and provided many basic plots, characters, and situations for plays, novels, and even poetry. The stories were widely known and became part of the body of allusions that literate Chinese knew and used in their own writings. For example, in the twentieth century Lu Xun retold, in extended fashion, a tale of magic swords that comes from Sou-shen Chi."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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 Zhaocheng The Magic Sword Miss Lianziang, the Fox-Girl The Quarrelsome Brothers The Princess Lily A Rip Van Winkle The Resuscitated Corpse Taoist Miracles A Chinese Solomon

In Chinese literary history, the Six Dynasties (317-588) and the T'ang (618-906) were the great creative times for the production of supernatural and fantastic stories in the classical language. This major collection of ninety-six stories, most of them newly translated, represents the very best of this tradition. These are all basically fictional narratives or stories, but unlike Western supernatural stories, are considered more or less as records of observable facts and have the effect of giving the fantastic a rootedness in historical reality. Underlying the recording of these supernatual stories is a belief in supernaturalism and magic and, above all, the acceptance of the unnatural and the supernormal on their face value as factual.