John Balcom (editor/translator/introducer) is an award-winning translator, a past president of the American Literary Translators Association, and an associate professor and the head of the Chinese program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

A dual-language edition of Chinese stories-many appearing in English for the first time

This new volume of eight short stories offers students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature from the world's most spoken language, without having to constantly to refer back to a dictionary.

The stories-many of which appear here in English for the first time-are by well-known writers as well as emerging voices. From a story by Li Rui about the honest simplicity of a Shanxi farmer to one by Ma Yuan exposing the seamy underside of contemporary urban society, they are infused with both rural dialect and urban slang and feature a wide range of styles and points of view.

Complete with notes, the stories make excellent reading in either language.
Note: For each short story in this eBook edition, the full English translation is followed by its original Chinese text.