Chinese Fairy Tales & Fantasies

This anthology, selected and translated by Moss Roberts, gathers roughly a hundred Chinese tales of magic, ghosts, animals, tricksters, officials, and household life, drawn from some twenty-five centuries of writing. Stories range from early legends and anomaly accounts to later literary tales in which fox spirits, judges, scholars, and wives test one another. Typical subjects include transformation, bureaucratic satire, animal fables, and the crossing of the human and spirit worlds. The arrangement is thematic rather than a single framed narrative. It is a reader's collection of fairy tale and zhiguai-style fantasy, not a folklore field transcription.

Bound in black buckram, cover blocked with a colour design by Victo Ngai. Gold slipcase.