About the book (from Wikipedia):
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio or Liaozhai Zhiyi is a collection of mostly supernatural tales written by Pu Songling in Classical Chinese during the early Qing dynasty.
The stories differ broadly in length, with the shortest under a page long. Many are classified as Chuanqi, or Zhiguai, sometimes translated as “marvel tales”, that is, stories written in classical Chinese starting in the Tang dynasty. Pu borrows from a tradition of oral storytelling where the boundary between reality and the odd or fantastic is blurred. The stories are filled with magical foxes, ghosts, scholars, jiangshi, court officials, Taoist exorcists and beasts.
About the translator (from Wikipedia):
Herbert Allen Giles was a British diplomat, sinologist, and professor of Chinese language. Giles was educated at Charterhouse School before becoming a British diplomat in China. He modified a Mandarin Chinese Romanization system earlier established by Thomas Wade, resulting in the widely known Wade–Giles Chinese romanisation system. Among his many works were translations of the Analects of Confucius, the Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching), the Chuang Tzu, and, in 1892, the first widely published Chinese-English dictionary.
