聊斋志异 (Liaozhai Zhiyi)

In 17th-century China, a disappointed scholar named Pu Songling spent decades documenting the strange and the supernatural. What he created was a collection of 491 tales where fox spirits seduce young gentlemen, ghost maidens fall in love with mortal poets, and demons walk among the living wearing human faces. This is a world where the uncanny mirrors the corrupt: what Pu Songling couldn't say about greedy officials and crooked magistrates in his own time, he said through ghosts and goblins. The fox who takes beautiful form to seduce a vulnerable scholar may be dangerous, but she is often more honest than the human bureaucrats who destroy innocent lives. Yet the stories that endure, the ones that have made this collection beloved for three centuries, are the love stories: a ghost who returns night after night to be with the man she met at a moonlit party, a fox maiden who chooses mortality to stay with the one she loves, a loyal spirit who serves as a matchmaker from beyond the grave. These tales crack open the boundary between the living and the dead and find something achingly human on the other side. For readers who believe the best ghost stories are love stories, and for anyone who wants to understand the Chinese literary imagination at its most inventive.