Best of
Fiction

1791

Dream of the Red Chamber


Cao Xueqin - 1791
    Chi-chen Wang's translation is skillful and accurate.

The Story of the Stone, Volume I


Cao Xueqin - 1791
    1760) is one of the greatest novels of Chinese literature. The first part of the story, The Golden Days, begins the tale of Bao-yu, a gentle young boy who prefers girls to Confucian studies, and his two cousins: Bao-chai, his parents' choice of a wife for him, and the ethereal beauty Dai-yu. Through the changing fortunes of the Jia family, this rich, magical work sets worldly events - love affairs, sibling rivalries, political intrigues, even murder - within the context of the Buddhist understanding that earthly existence is an illusion and karma determines the shape of our lives.

A Dream of Red Mansions


Cao Xueqin - 1791
    The Ching Dynasty (1644-1911) was the last feudal dynasty in China. Although it saw a period of relative stability, feudal society was already on the decline and all the contradictions inherent in it were sharpening. This classic novel (an erotic tale of love, sex and passion) is a masterpiece of realism takes as its background the decline of several related big families and drawing much from the author's own experiences. It is a book about political struggle, a political-historical novel. Cao Xueqin focused on the tragic love between Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu and, in the meantime, provides a panorama of the lives of people of various levels in the degenerating empire. The author's family were close to the Ching imperial house in general, and with Emperor Kang-hsi in particular. He died in 1763 without having finished his novel. It stands out in the world literature ranking with "Hamlet" and "War and Peace." This is the first English translation of the complete text of this classical Chinese novel. Translated by Yang Hsien-yi and his British wife Gladys Young with many full-page illustrations by Tai Tun-Pang. The translation appears in three volumes of forty chapters each.

The Dwarf of Westerbourg


Christian Heinrich Spieß - 1791
    The Dwarf of Westerbourg, out of print for almost two hundred years in English, and with only three copies of the original print run known to exist, is the acknowledged masterpiece of Christian Heinrich Spiess, and one of the most outrageous Gothic novels ever produced in that genre's heyday.Set in the thirteenth century, this bizarre story of Rodolphe of Westerbourg, a knight, and the dwarf-phantom Peter, is replete with black magic, gruesome killings and horrid happenings-is, in fact, a whirlwind of strange adventure piled on strange adventure, a downward spiraling, the depths of which few works of literature have managed to achieve.Upon its original publication in Germany in 1791, the book, with its questionable morality and unmentionable events, shocked readers and quickly became a bestseller of its time.The Dwarf of Westerbourg, an influence on both Matthew Lewis's The Monk and the works of Ann Radcliffe, might be considered the Holy Grail of Gothic horror novels, an item for the connoisseur of the ghastly, and is here finally made available again to the English speaking public.