Far Eastern category: 291 books

Read here one of the four great classics of Chinese Literature, Hung Lou Meng: Dream of the Red Chamber, BOOK II The novel follows the loves and troubles of Chia Pao-Yu, heir to the Chia clan as the clan rises in fortune and eventually falls from grace.

Burton Watson and Haruo Shirane, renowned translators and scholars, introduce English-speaking readers to the vivid tradition of early and medieval Japanese anecdotal (setsuwa) literature. These orally narrated and written tales drew on both local folk tradition and continental sources. Taken from...

Winner of the Kobayashi Hideo Award, The Fall of Language in the Age of English lays bare the struggle to retain the brilliance of one's own language in this period of English-language dominance. Born in Tokyo but raised and educated in the United States, Minae Mizumura acknowledges the value of a...

With a little stretch of the imagination, it might be suggested that some Chinese tales from the Sung Dynasty are the precursors of modern detective fiction. Numerous stories in which Lord Bau is the chief protagonist bolster this conjecture. In this collection, translated from Chinese anthologies and...

Li Po (701-762) is considered one of the greatest poets to live during the Tang dynasty—what was considered to be the golden age for Chinese poetry. He was also the first Chinese poet to become well known in the West, and he greatly influenced many American poets during the twentieth century. Calling...

Du Fu (712–777) has been called China's greatest poet, and some call him the greatest nonepic, nondramatic poet whose writings survive in any language. Du Fu excelled in a great variety of poetic forms, showing a richness of language ranging from elegant to colloquial, from allusive to direct. His...

Written by court princesses, exiled officials, Zen priests, and recluses, the 150 poems translated here represent the rich diversity of Japan’s poetic tradition. Varying in tone from the sensuous and erotic to the profoundly spiritual, each poem captures a sense of the poignant beauty and longing...

A collection of plays, essays, poetry, and reportage compiled by “the 20th-century’s premier scholar of Japanese literature” (Slate). Modern Japanese Literature is Donald Keene’s critically acclaimed companion volume to his landmark Anthology of Japanese Literature. Now considered the...

Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices,...

This book is a critical study of ten postwar Japanese novels that focus on man's search for identity in the modern world. With the presentation of the Nobel Prize for Literature to a Japanese author in 1969, the international significance of modern Japanese literature was formally recognized...

Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) was the foremost Japanese novelist of the twentieth century, known for such highly acclaimed works as Kokoro, Sanshiro, and I Am a Cat. Yet he began his career as a literary theorist and scholar of English literature. In 1907, he published Theory of Literature, a remarkably...

The incomparable poetry of Han Shan (Cold Mountain) and his sidekick Shih Te, the rebel poets who became icons of Chinese poetry and Zen, has long captured the imagination of poetry lovers and Zen aficionados. Popularized in the West by Beat Generation writers Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, these legendary...

Lu Xun (1881–1936) is widely considered the greatest writer of twentieth-century China. Although primarily known for his two slim volumes of short fiction, he was a prolific, inventive essayist. These 62 essays—20 translated for the first time—showcase his versatility as a master of prose forms and his brilliance as a cultural critic.

Throughout the twentieth century, Chinese writers have confronted the problem of creating a new literary tradition that both maintains the culturally unique aspects of a rich heritage and succeeds in promoting a new modernity. In the first book-length treatment of the topic, Wendy Larson examines...