Chinese classics, retold for modern readers.

Pu Songling's studio of the strange. Nearly five hundred tales of fox spirits, painted ghosts, and the thin wall between the living and the dead — set down over forty years by a scholar who kept failing the imperial exams.

A stone monkey who would not kneel. Gods, generals, and a monkey born from rock who storms the courts of heaven before being pressed into the long pilgrimage west.

The war that made the gods. A dynasty falls, immortals take sides, and the dead are enrolled into a new bureaucracy of heaven.

The lightest philosophy ever written. Useless trees, contented fish, and a man unsure whether he dreamed the butterfly.

On duty, learning, and the good life. The collected sayings of Confucius and his students — short, oblique, endlessly quoted.

The radical case for impartial care. Confucianism's great early rival — a disciplined movement of artisans, engineers, and logicians who argued, against the grain of their age, for impartial care for all, against aggressive war, and against waste and empty ritual.

Win first, then go to war. Thirteen terse chapters that have outlived every army that read them — the oldest treatise on war still in print, and still the most quoted.

Rule by law, not by virtue. The coldest, clearest voice in Chinese political thought — the book that taught rulers to trust systems, not character.