Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts
Stories and Essays
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Qian Zhongshu was one of twentieth-century China's most ingenious literary stylists, one whose insights into the ironies and travesties of modern China remain stunningly fresh. Between the early years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the Communist takeover in 1949, Qian wrote a brilliant series of short stories, essays, and a comedic novel that continue to inspire generations of Chinese readers.
With this long-awaited translation, English-language readers can immerse themselves in the invention and satirical wit of one of the world's great literary cosmopolitans. This collection brings together Qian's best short works, combining his iconoclastic essays on the "book of life" from Written in the Margins of Life (1941) with the four masterful short stories of Human, Beast, Ghost (1946). His essays elucidate substantive issues through deceptively simple subjects-the significance of windows versus doors, for example, or the blind spots of literary criticsand assert the primacy of critical and creative independence. His stories blur the boundaries between humans, beasts, and ghosts as they struggle through life, death, and resurrection. Christopher G. Rea situates these works within China's wartime politics and Qian's literary vision, highlighting significant changes that Qian Zhongshu made to different editions of his writings and providing unprecedented insight into the author's creative process.
Qian Zhongshu
The fiction writer, essayist, editor, and poet Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998) was one of China’s foremost “scholar-novelists.” With a mastery of Chinese, English, Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, Qian is seen by many as the last link in an unbroken chain of geniuses stretching back to Confucius. In 1935, he passed his examinations with the highest score in history. He wrote landmark texts on classical Chinese literature as well as short stories, poems, essays, and a second unfinished novel, Heart of the Artichoke, which was lost in the wartime mail.
More by Qian Zhongshu
Nathan K. Mao
Nathan K. Mao was a Professor of English at Shippensburg University and the translator of Ba Jin’s Cold Nights and Li Yu’s Twelve Towers.
Christopher Rea
Christopher Rea is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the editor of Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu and the coeditor of The Business of Culture: Cultural Entrepreneurs in China and Southeast Asia, 1900–60.
Phil Williams
Phil Williams is a storyteller, merging the worlds of "normal" life, grief, spirituality, sports and more-sometimes with a humorous touch and often with a knack for the whimsical. A former collegiate football star at Florida State University (two-time Academic All-American), he spent nearly three decades as an NFL agent before stumbling through the brutal aftermath of his daughter's death in search of healing and truth, open to exploring modalities that would have previously been taboo. For the last decade or so, he has enjoyed traversing what he calls the "Robinson Crusoe beaches of the Caribbean" in Costa Rica.
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