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Gr 7-Up Known as the Liao-chai, these enchanting stories were first collected by a scholar named Pu Sung-ling a century before the Grimms began their work in Europe. Wildly popular in China but little known in the West, they draw on the supernatural or unusual to cast their spell. For example, in "Planting a Pear Tree," a greedy fruit vendor watches his wares magically disappear after h...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

Attracted to a maiden in a painting on the wall of a monastery, a young man enters the wall and finds her waiting there for him. A magician performing in a marketplace sends his son into the clouds on a rope to steal peaches from a heavenly garden. A failed scholar's spirit enters the body of a crow. Bedard retells twenty-three stories out of hundreds gathered by seventeenth-century Shandong scholar Pu Songling and commonly titled Liaozhai zhiyi, or "The Studio of Leisure's Records of the Strange." The Painted Wall...Log In or Sign Up to Read More