Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio (selections from Volume 1)

In seventeenth-century China, Pu Songling wrote nearly five hundred tales in which the dead are more honorable than the living, fox spirits more loyal than scholars, and the supernatural world operates by a moral logic that exposes the corruption of human society. These are not simple ghost stories. They are sharp, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking inversions of the natural order: ghosts who seek justice, vixen spirits who fall in love with mortal scholars, Taoist exorcists battling demons while court officials line their pockets. Pu draws on a rich tradition of oral storytelling to create works that entertain and disturb in equal measure. The boundary between reality and the fantastic dissolves, but what remains vivid is the author's disillusion with his own world. Humans are weak, indecisive, easily manipulated. The supposedly degenerate spirits are bold, trustworthy, even noble. This is supernatural literature as social satire, where the Other reveals the hollowness of human virtue.