Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Volume 2

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio is a masterwork of the supernatural imagination, a collection of nearly 500 tales written in 17th-century China that reshaped the boundaries between the human and the otherworldly. Pu Songling populates his world with fox spirits who take beautiful form to seduce scholars, ghosts who cling to mortal affairs with more passion than the living, Taoist exorcists battling shape-shifters, and scholars navigating a realm where desire and danger wear the same face. These are not mere ghost stories: they are fierce satires that invert Confucian morality, revealing spirits who keep their promises while humans break them, creatures more faithful in love than any court official, and a bureaucratic afterlife as corrupt as the earthly one. The fox vixens, in particular, became icons of Chinese culture, embodiments of transformation, temptation, and terrible tenderness. Pu wrote in Classical Chinese but thought in folk rhythms, and the oral storytelling pulse still beats through every tale. This is the book that taught China, and then the world, that the line between the strange and the true is thinner than anyone admits.