THERE have been many English translations of Chinese stories ;
among them, E. D. Edwards's two volumes of Chinese Prose Litera- ture (1937-8) and W. A. Giles's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio are perhaps the best known. The above two volumes, how- ever, are noteworthy for two reasons : they are the work of a Chinese, Chi-Chen Wang, and they give a more comprehensive view of Chinese prose literature than any other single collection, since they include a selection of both the old and the modern literature of China. It must be admitted that the majority of these stories, whether old or new, are mainly of interest to scholars, literary his- torians and the generally curious, but there is one story in the contemporary volume which is worthy to rank with the work of our famous European short-story writers, and it is an extract from the novel The Torrent of Life, by Pa Chin, who is not yet forty years old and is claimed by Chi-Chen Wang as " the first great novelist produced by, the Literary Revolution." Certainly, if the rest of the novel is on the same high level as this abridgment of Chapters 36 and 37, which appears here under the title of "The Puppet Dead," then Pa Chin is the equal of any living European novelist.
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