Featured on LeVar Burton Reads “Like Oscar Wilde or Ray Bradbury, E. Lily Yu writes the kind of delicious short stories that come with a sting in the tail. Utterly beguiling.” —Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get in Trouble “Each story here is a gem. A trove of fantastical treasures.” —Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW “An astonishing collection of stories…transformative.” —Library Journal STARRED REVIEW The strange, the sublime, and the monstrous confront one another with astonishing consequences in this collection of twenty-two stories from award-winning writer E. Lily Yu. In the village of Yiwei, a fallen wasp nest unfurls into a beautifully accurate map. In a field in Louisiana, birdwatchers forge an indelible connection over a shared glimpse of a Vermilion Flycatcher, and fall. In Nineveh, a judge who prides himself on impartiality finds himself questioned by a mysterious god. On a nameless shore, a small monster searches for refuge and finds unexpected courage. At turns bittersweet and boundary-breaking, poignant and profound, these twenty-two stories sing, as the oldest fables do, of what it means to be alive in this strange, terrible, beautiful world. For readers who loved the intelligence and compassion in Kim Fu's Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century and the dreamlike prose of Kelly Link's Magic for Beginners, this collection introduces the short fiction of E. Lily Yu, winner of the Astounding Award for Best New Writer and author of the Washington Book Award–winning novel On Fragile Waves, praised by the New York Times Book Review as "devastating and perfect." "A lovely story." —LeVar Burton, on "The Pilgrim and The Angel" (from Jewel Box: Stories)

GREAT!

Cursed with bad luck, a courageous young girl sets out in search of adventure, her only protection a little jewel box that she is to open only when in danger of death.

Klappentext: "This is a selection of popular Chinese stories from the 10th to the 17th centuries. These stories were written in the spoken language that developed as a literary medium after the emergence of an urban commercial economy in the Song Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279). Originally the manuscripts of ordinary street story-tellers, this genre of fiction - deriving its material from the life and times of the period, with vivid writing and intricate plots, descriptions that are natural and vivacious - has now attained a lofty place as literature. The twenty stories in this book are selected from over two hundred in several collections published at the beginning of the 17th century. The illustrations included in this volume are taken from contemporary editions." - Enthält: Introduction. - The jade worker. - The honest clerk. - Fifteen strings of cash. - The monk's billet-doux. - The foxes' revenge. - The hidden will. - The two brothers. - The beggar chief's daughter. - A just man avengd. - The tattered felt hat. - The courtesan's jewel box. - The oil vendor and the courtesan. - The old gardener. - Marriage by proxy. - The proud scholar. - The tangerines and the tortoise shell. - The story of a breggart. - The alchemist and his concubine. - A prefectship bought and lost. - The merry adventures of Lazy Dragon. - Die Erzählungen sind drei Sammlungen des Feng Menglong (Yushi mingyan, Jingshi tongyan und Xingshi hengyan) sowie der Sammlung "Paian jingqi" des Lin Mengchu entnommen. Insbesondere Erzählungen in den Sammlungen des Feng Menglong lassen sich vielfach auf ältere Quellen zurückführen.