THE SELECTED POEMS OF TAO CHIN brings into English some of the most important poetry in all of Chinese literature. As David Hinton writes in his introduction, Tao Chien "stands at the head of the great Chinese tradition like a revered grandfather: profoundly wise, self-possessed, quiet, comforting." Tao was the first writer to make a poetry of his natural voice and immediate experience, thereby creating the personal lyricism which distinguishes ancient Chinese poetry and makes it seem so contemporary. While maintaining a scholar's attention to the complexities of the original, Hinton here recreates Tao Chien as a compelling poetic voice in English.

    At The Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996 marks a pivotal point in the poet's oeuvre, presenting the increasingly lyrical, meditative poems written in the years following his banishment from China in 1989.Translated into twenty-five languages, Bei Dao's work has long been appreciated internationally, but is just recently gaining a larger audience in the U.S. At The Sky's Edge becomes Bei Dao's seventh book published by New Directions and is the first time Forms of Distance appears in a paperbook edition. The translations of David Hinton, who was awarded the prestigious Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets in 1997, capture both the musicality and density of the original Chinese. Quiet, spare, these are poems of paradox and possibility, of words carefully balanced, of a world on edge.

    This is the first book in English on the seventeenth-century Chinese masterpiece Liaozhai's Records of the Strange (Liaozhai zhiyi) by Pu Songling, a collection of nearly five hundred fantastic tales and anecdotes written in Classical Chinese.

    Drawing on medieval Chinese poetry, fiction, and religious scriptures, this book illuminates the greatest goddess of Taoism and her place in Chinese society.