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1084 books found.
三俠五義
By Shi Yukun
Judge Bao, the incorruptible magistrate of the Song court, solves crimes with the help of a band of knights-errant who put their swords at the service of justice. Drawn from the storyteller's art, it is one of the founding books of martial arts fiction.
120 chapters · About 919 minutes of published text
三國志演義
By Luo Guanzhong
As the Han dynasty crumbles at the end of the second century, three sworn brothers, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, take up arms, and the empire splits among rival warlords. Battles, stratagems and shifting loyalties fill a century of war, with the cunning Cao Cao and the strategist Zhuge Liang among its great figures.
119 chapters · About 1053 minutes of published text
世説新語
By 劉義慶
Liu Yiqing's collection of brief anecdotes and sayings of the scholars and statesmen of the Han and Jin courts, sorted under thirty-six headings from virtue and speech to eccentricity and slander. The wit of the Wei-Jin gentry made it a model of elegant prose.
36 chapters · About 132 minutes of published text
九命奇冤
By 吳趼人
A feud over a family's graves and a villain's greed lead to nine deaths in Guangdong, and a long fight through the courts to reach justice. Wu Jianren's mystery is told with unusual order and was an early Chinese detective novel.
36 chapters · About 222 minutes of published text
二刻拍案驚奇
By 凌濛初
The second Slap series by Ling Mengchu: forty further stories of cunning marriages, lawsuits and swindlers, ending with a short play on Song Jiang. The book shows the late Ming taste for the sensational.
40 chapters · About 773 minutes of published text
二十年目睹之怪現狀
By Wu Jianren
A young man who calls himself Nine Deaths travels among the officials, merchants and swindlers of the late Qing for twenty years and writes down every fraud he sees. A sprawling satirical novel of a society where nothing is what it pretends to be.
108 chapters · About 1002 minutes of published text
人間失格
By 太宰治
Three notebooks left by a man who has never understood other people tell how he hid behind the mask of a clown and slid through drink, drugs, women and a failed double suicide. Dazai Osamu's novel of 1948, finished shortly before his own death, is among the most widely read confessions in modern Japanese literature.
6 chapters · About 142 minutes of published text
今古奇觀
By 抱甕老人
Forty of the best tales from the Three Words and the Two Slaps anthologies, chosen by a Ming-dynasty editor who signs himself the Old Man of the Gourd. They include Du Shiniang sinking her treasure chest and the oil seller who wins the courtesan.
40 chapters · About 838 minutes of published text
儒林外史
By 吴敬梓
A string of scholars, officials and hangers-on pass through the Ming examination world, some chasing rank by any means and a few refusing it altogether. Wu Jingzi's satire links its episodes by the people who walk from one into the next, mocking vanity, hypocrisy and the cult of the degree.
56 chapters · About 604 minutes of published text
兒女英雄傳
By Wenkang
A mild young scholar on his way to rescue his father is saved from murderous monks by the swordswoman Thirteenth Sister, who is out to avenge her own father. A nineteenth-century novel in lively Beijing speech, it joins martial adventure to domestic comedy.
40 chapters · About 1015 minutes of published text
初刻拍案驚奇
By 凌濛初
Ling Mengchu's first collection of forty tales, which opens with the luckless merchant who makes a fortune from a basket of oranges. Strange and comic happenings among merchants, scholars and wives fill each short chapter.
40 chapters · About 720 minutes of published text
吾輩は猫である
By 夏目漱石
A nameless cat who lives with a schoolteacher called Kushami watches the household and the friends who come to talk, scheme and boast in his study. Natsume Soseki's first novel (1905–06) turns the cat's dry eye on the airs of Meiji intellectuals and their endless talk.
11 chapters · About 648 minutes of published text
喻世明言
By 馮夢龍
Forty stories, the first of Feng Menglong's Three Words, gathering Song and Yuan storytellers' tales and Ming imitations. Jiang Xingge's pearl shirt, honest officials and quarrelling friends give a wide view of ordinary life.
40 chapters · About 647 minutes of published text
坊っちゃん
By 夏目漱石
A hot-tempered young graduate from Tokyo takes a post teaching mathematics at a middle school in the provinces, where scheming colleagues and mischievous pupils soon try his patience. Natsume Soseki's comic novel of 1906 sets one honest man's quick fists against the small politics of a country town.
11 chapters · About 179 minutes of published text
好逑傳
The scholar Tie Zhongyu and the clever Miss Shui meet in a series of dangerous trials and protect each other's honour against a greedy official's son. A scholar-beauty romance that Europeans translated early, it prizes restraint over passion.
18 chapters · About 230 minutes of published text
子不語
By 袁枚
Yuan Mei took his title from the saying that the Master did not speak of prodigies, and then spoke of little else. Its many short tales of ghosts, strange deaths and the afterlife are told with wit.
24 chapters · About 477 minutes of published text
孽海花
By Zeng Pu
A top examination graduate takes a young courtesan as his concubine and, as envoy to Europe, brings her to Berlin and St Petersburg, where she makes her own way. Around them the novel paints the scholars, officials and reformers of late Qing China in the decades before 1900.
35 chapters · About 472 minutes of published text
封神演義
By 陳仲琳
The tyrant Zhou of Shang offends the goddess Nuwa and sets heaven and earth against him, as the sage Jiang Ziya leads King Wu of Zhou to war with immortals and monsters on both sides. At the end the fallen heroes are invested as gods in a celestial bureaucracy.
100 chapters · About 1056 minutes of published text
山月記
By 中島敦
Li Zheng, a gifted Tang official who gave up his post to become a poet, has been turned into a tiger, and an old friend meets him by night on a mountain road. Nakajima Atsushi's story of 1942, adapted from a Chinese tale, makes the tiger's confession of pride and fear a classic of modern Japanese writing.
1 chapter · About 12 minutes of published text
巴黎茶花女遺事
By 小仲馬 (translated by 林紓)
A young man recounts his love for a Parisian courtesan who gives up her patron's wealth for him and then dies young. Lin Shu's 1899 version of Dumas fils, made with Wang Shouchang, was China's first widely read Western novel.
16 chapters · About 94 minutes of published text
平山冷燕
By 荻岸山人
Four young talents, the poet-girls Shan Dai and Leng Jiangxue and the scholars Ping Ruheng and Yan Baiyan, outshine the court in poetry competitions and find husbands among them. A gentle comedy of talent.
20 chapters · About 244 minutes of published text
搜神記
By 干寶
Gan Bao gathered stories of immortals, ghosts, strange animals, omens and dreams in the fourth century, the founding collection of Chinese tales of the marvellous. Its short entries, many only a paragraph long, give the earliest form of many legends later told again.
20 chapters · About 121 minutes of published text
文明小史
By 李寶嘉
Li Baojia's satire of the enlightenment fashion that swept China in the last years of the Qing, as young men from the provinces seek foreign learning with no idea what it is. Blundering reformers, officials and students make up the cast.
61 chapters · About 551 minutes of published text
斷鴻零雁記
By 蘇曼殊
A young monk of mixed Chinese and Japanese blood remembers his lost childhood in Japan and the love that cannot be fulfilled with the girl Jingzi. Su Manshu's first-person romance of 1912 is told in a lyrical literary prose.
27 chapters · About 54 minutes of published text