Latest / Asian Review of Books
Wu Jianren, "New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction Novel" (Columbia UP, 2025)
What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China?
That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone (Columbia UP, 2025), written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China and the Boxer Rebellion, and then to the fantastical “Realm of Civilization,” a world that, in Wu’s eyes, reflected what he thought would happen if people embraced Chinese beliefs.
Liz Webber just released a new translation on New Story of the Stone, and joins us…
The skinny
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