Fox-spirits who become beautiful scholars' wives, a painted skin hiding a demon, ghosts who fall in love with the living — China's master of the uncanny, one tale at a time.
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This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
Pu Songling spent a lifetime collecting the strange: love stories between humans and fox-spirits, judges of Hell taking bribes, walls you can walk through if you truly believe. Each tale is a few pages of perfectly controlled wonder — eerie, erotic, sly.
The tales are short and self-contained, which makes them ideal interlinear reading: finish one ghost story a night in the original classical Chinese, every character glossed.
Making an interlinear Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, One tale gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
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