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
Translated by: Herbert A. Giles
Foreword by: Victoria Cass