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1084 books found.
月界旅行
By 儒勒·凡爾納 (translated by 魯迅)
Members of the Baltimore Gun Club decide to launch a projectile to the moon from a giant cannon in Florida. Lu Xun's 1903 free translation of Jules Verne turns the adventure into an introduction to science for Chinese readers.
14 chapters · About 84 minutes of published text
東周列國志
By 余邵鱼
From the death of King Xuan of Zhou to the unification of China by Qin, the novel retells the Spring and Autumn and Warring States centuries as one tale. Dukes, ministers, assassins and strategists rise and fall as the old order dissolves.
108 chapters · About 1198 minutes of published text
楊家將演義
By 熊大木
General Yang Ye and his sons and descendants guard the Song border against the Liao, betrayed by jealous courtiers. Yang Liulang, She Taijun and the women of the Yang family became staples of Chinese stage and story.
50 chapters · About 270 minutes of published text
水滸傳
By Shi Nai'an
In the last years of the Northern Song, corrupt officials drive one honest man after another into outlawry, until a hundred and eight heroes gather in the marshes of Liangshan. Told as a chain of linked adventures, it follows brawlers, scholars and fugitives on their way to the mountain stronghold.
70 chapters · About 939 minutes of published text
水滸後傳
By 陳忱
The surviving outlaws of Liangshan scatter in the last years of the Song and sail south to found a new refuge overseas. Chen Chen's sequel to the Water Margin is a book of loyal exile written after the fall of the Ming.
40 chapters · About 441 minutes of published text
河童
By 芥川龍之介
A patient in an asylum tells how he fell into the land of the kappa, water-sprites whose country mirrors Japan's, with its own art, law and views of birth and death. Akutagawa's satire of 1927, written in the last months of his life, sees human society through the eyes of its odd and unsparing inhabitants.
18 chapters · About 75 minutes of published text
注文の多い料理店
By 宮沢賢治
Two young gentlemen hunters, lost in the mountains with their dogs dead, find a restaurant whose every door bears a polite notice asking a little more of them. Miyazawa Kenji's tale, the title story of the only collection he published in his lifetime (1924), is a darkly comic fable about city men and the creatures they hunt.
1 chapter · About 10 minutes of published text
浮生六記
By 沈復
Shen Fu, a minor clerk and artist of Suzhou, recalls his happy marriage to the clever Yun, the pleasures of small things, and the poverty that wrecked it all. Its six records are among the most loved memoirs in Chinese.
6 chapters · About 105 minutes of published text
海上花列傳
By Han Bangqing
In the courtesan houses of 1890s Shanghai, clients, sing-song girls and their madams bargain over money, love and position. Its dialogue is written in Wu dialect, and its many interwoven stories are told with cool, unsentimental realism.
64 chapters · About 557 minutes of published text
玉梨魂
By 徐枕亞
A young widow, Bai Meiniang, and the tutor He Mengxia fall in love but are held apart by duty, and she urges him to marry her sister-in-law instead. Xu Zhenya's 1912 romance in ornate parallel prose was the bestseller of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school.
30 chapters · About 196 minutes of published text
紅樓夢
By 程偉元
Young Jia Baoyu grows up among his cousins in the vast Rongguo mansion, bound by a fated attachment to the fragile Lin Daiyu while his family steers him toward Xue Baochai. Cao Xueqin's great novel follows the splendour of the Jia clan to its ruin, with Gao E's forty closing chapters.
120 chapters · About 1695 minutes of published text
羅生門
By 芥川龍之介
In a Kyoto ruined by earthquake, fire and famine, a servant who has lost his place shelters from the rain under the decaying Rashomon gate and wonders whether he must turn thief to live. Akutagawa's short story of 1915, drawn from a medieval collection of tales, turns on what he does when he climbs to the tower where the unclaimed dead are left.
1 chapter · About 11 minutes of published text
老殘遊記
By Liu E
An itinerant doctor wanders through Shandong in the last years of the Qing, curing patients, listening to ballad singers and looking into the cruelty of officials who believe their own honesty excuses everything. Part travel book, part detective story and part political allegory.
20 chapters · About 198 minutes of published text
聊齋誌異
By 蒲松齡
Pu Songling's strange tales of fox spirits, ghosts, scholars and lovers, told in a limpid literary style and sprinkled with sharp comment on corrupt officials. Beautiful fox women and honest men who fall in love with them are the collection's favourite figures.
12 chapters · About 835 minutes of published text
花月痕
By 魏子安
The scholar Wei Chisheng and the courtesan Liu Qiuhen, and their friends Han Hanshi and Du Caichun, find that talent in the late Qing is not rewarded by power. Wei Xiuren's novel mixes love, war and failed ambition.
52 chapters · About 426 minutes of published text
英烈傳
The rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, from beggar monk to the first Ming emperor, is told through the battles and counsellors who help him defeat the Yuan and rival warlords. Liu Bowen, Xu Da and Chang Yuchun are the heroes around him.
80 chapters · About 399 minutes of published text
蕩寇志
By 俞万春
Yu Wanchun's continuation of the Water Margin from chapter seventy-one: loyal Song generals hunt down the Liangshan outlaws until they are destroyed. It is an anti-rebel reply to the earlier novel.
35 chapters · About 649 minutes of published text
西遊補
By 董說
In a dream, Sun Wukong is lured into a world of illusion by the Green-Green Fish and wanders through time and the underworld, even playing at being an emperor. Dong Yue's strange supplement to the Journey to the West is a satire of desire and history.
16 chapters · About 77 minutes of published text
西遊記
By Wu Cheng'en
A stone monkey born from a rock learns magic, makes himself a nuisance to Heaven and is pinned beneath a mountain, until he is freed to guard the monk Xuanzang on his long road to India for the Buddhist scriptures. With a greedy pig, a quiet river ogre and a dragon turned horse, the pilgrims meet eighty-one ordeals of demons, spirits and their own failings.
100 chapters · About 1284 minutes of published text
說岳全傳
By 錢彩
Born as a great roc descends to earth, the Song general Yue Fei rises from a poor village to lead the war against the Jurchen invaders. Court intrigue, the traitor Qin Hui and the sons who take up his cause fill this long legendary biography.
80 chapters · About 751 minutes of published text
走れメロス
By 太宰治
A young shepherd named Melos, condemned by a tyrant king, is given three days to go home for his sister's wedding while his friend Selinuntius waits in his place as hostage. Dazai Osamu's short story of 1940, adapted from Schiller's ballad, follows his race back through flood and bandits to keep his word.
1 chapter · About 19 minutes of published text
醒世恆言
By 馮夢龍
Forty vernacular stories collected by Feng Menglong in 1627, among them the oil seller who wins the courtesan Huaikui and the magistrate who pairs the wrong lovers. Marriage, money and the justice of humble people run through the volume.
40 chapters · About 1022 minutes of published text
野叟曝言
By 夏敬渠
Wen Suchen, a hero of perfect learning and virtue, defeats foreign tribes, wins many wives and saves the empire in this vast Qing fantasy of the Confucian scholar. A strange mix of piety, military romance and sexual fantasy.
154 chapters · About 2134 minutes of published text
銀河鉄道の夜
By 宮沢賢治
On the night of the Centaurus Festival a lonely schoolboy named Giovanni finds himself on a train that runs along the Milky Way beside his friend Campanella, among stars, strange passengers and the souls of the lost. Left unfinished at Miyazawa Kenji's death in 1933, it is one of the most loved Japanese stories of childhood, grief and the search for happiness.
9 chapters · About 77 minutes of published text