Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi

by Hong Mai, Cong Ellen Zhang (Translator)

"Scholars who know classical Chinese have been reading and citing Hon Mai's wonderful collection for many years. Now students can access these informative materials through Zhang's lively English translations. They are both fun to read and deeply informative about daily life, religion, markets, and multiple social groups in the twelfth century. The comprehensive thematic guide allows readers to locate tales by subject matter, making this collection of 100 narratives ideal for classroom use."
—Valerie Hansen, Yale University

160 pages, Paperback

Published March 2, 2018

Reviews

[Ring Chime · Rating 3 out of 5]

I personally preferred Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio over this book. There were certainly many more absurd things written in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio than in this text. The genre of Strange Accounts in China when it was supposed to be second or third or forth or a few here and there first hand accounts of things that supposedly happened constrained some of these earlier Strange Accounts in terms of how strange they could be. I also read Strange Tales first, so that partly accounts for what I think is probably my feelings that certain themes are a bit more tired. Strange Tales would have felt more fresh I personally think to readers back in the early Qing Dynasty than Record of the Listener's tales.