Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Vol. 2 (of 2)

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio is a collection of tales from 17th-century China that defies every genre expectation. Pu Songling populated his narratives with fox spirits who shed their animal forms to pursue love, ghosts bound to the living world by longing and regret, and supernatural beings who test human virtue in unexpected ways. These are not horror stories. They are something more unsettling and beautiful: intimate encounters with the Other, where desire blurs the line between human and spirit, and moral wisdom arrives wrapped in wonder. The tales range from the achingly romantic to the darkly comic to the quietly devastating. A fox woman falls in love and must choose between immortality and mortality. A scholar discovers too late that his beloved is not of this world. Justice arrives from the spirit realm when earthly courts fail. Each story is a small universe, dense with atmosphere and spiked with surprise. This is one of the greatest works of Chinese literature, a book that has bewitched readers for centuries with its combination of the uncanny and the deeply human.