Top 10 works of Chinese literature
- By Elaine Duan
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E-mail China.org.cn, December 1, 2010
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (simplified Chinese: 聊斋志异; pinyin: Liáo Zhāi Zhì Yì)
Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a collection of 491 supernatural tales written in Classical Chinese during the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The author, Pu Sonling, is acknowledged as one of the masters of the short story along with Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov.
In his tales of shape-shifting spirits, ghosts, bizarre phenomena, haunted houses and enchanted objects, Pu pushes the boundaries of human experience and enlightens as he entertains. Moral purposes are often inverted between humans and the supposedly degenerate ghosts or spirits, resulting in a satirical edge to some of the stories.
With elegant prose, witty wordplay, and subtle charm, the nearly five hundred stories in this collection reveal a world in which nothing is as it seems, and the boundary between reality and the odd or fantastic is blurred.
Translations into different languages are available worldwide. Austrian novelist Franz Kafka admired these tales in translation and described them as "exquisite".
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