Lots of fun stories. The most notable theme is sex with fox spirits although there's a good variety of stuff too, with varying morals and conclusions even when the set-up is pretty similar. There's nothing here that made me think "woah that's amazing" hence the 4 star but I enjoyed reading every single story here - there's a lot of cool ideas and overall there's an amazing and absorbing atmosphere that really takes you into the world of the Chinese studio.

The Penguin edition I was using has very helpful notes and a good glossary that help you understand the setting for each story as well as pointing out allusions to classic Chinese literature - although I'd note it relies notably on 19th century sources and stuff quite a bit, dunno how some of the explanations of concepts stand up to modern scholarship. 1 story adds the commentary which is apparently standard in the full original Chinese editions. ( )

I've been reading a lot of "difficult" books recently, and a few short books that just weren't very good. Amid that pile, Pu's tales were a glorious reminder of why people enjoy telling stories, why people enjoy reading them, and how many different ways something can be interesting.

Short of listing the best stories here, there's not much to review. THere are supernatural tales (ghosts and 'foxes'); there are little anecdotes; there are morality tales; there are anti-morality tales; and most of all there's a kind of joy I just don't get from a lot of contemporary books. I've been recommending this to all of my meat-space friends since I finished reading it. Now I recommend it to my interwebby friends on goodreads: anyone who likes to read will love this book.*

As a special bonus, you'll learn a bit about Imperial era China. As a super-extra-special bonus, the editor/translator includes illustrations from a nineteenth century Chinese edition of the text. They are fabulous.


* caveat: this is a book written by a lonely scholar for other lonely scholars, all of whom are men. There's a lot of lady-love wish-fulfillment. It's unfortunate. ( )

Read, favourite. ( )

Boy, they weren’t kidding. These are some strange tales! The introduction in my edition was helpful in putting me in a frame of mind so I wasn’t just thinking “what on earth is this?!” It helped flesh out the setting of the lonely garden studio of a Chinese scholar. I appreciated the choices of the translator, as this edition does not contain all the tales, and thought they did a good job varying between one-page stories and longer ones. Some of the stories are similar, but I think that probably reflects the original, and not the editing choices of the translator. The stories illuminate how ghosts and spirits are different between Western and Chinese traditions—they seem more corporeal for the Chinese; you can even marry them and have children! The stories are a good introduction of the idea of fox spirits, those creatures like the selkies and water spirits of Northern Europe, who seduce men, for good or evil. The fox spirits of Chinese culture, however, can also be more like poltergeists that need to be eliminated. I also like that at the end of my edition they gave the original author’s preface with a full annotation, line by line, so that the reader can appreciate the complexity of his writing in a way they could not do for every story.
I wish that my edition included all the stories, though maybe that would be asking for an even more repetitive read. ( )

I usually read these tales one at a time, in bed, just before I went to sleep, and that is how I would recommend others to read them. ( )