Publishing creates strange bedfellows. A new magazine has just hit the shelves in Italy, in which I find myself side by side with Robert E. Howard, Lin carter and Pu Songling.
Now Pu Songling was a weird chap.
He spent his life collecting ghost stories and other strange tales, and circulated them among his friends, privately, because stories of the supernatural were not considered a proper thing to take an interest into according to the dominating Confucian culture of the time.
This was, after all, the Qing dynasty.
Today, Pu Songling’s Liaozhai Zhiyi, translated as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a well known and much loved classic. It can be found in a number of translations, and it inspired a number of movies and plays and whatnot.
It is probably the first stop for anyone interested in Chinese supernatural and folk tales. Continue reading →