Selected Short Fiction
Lu Xun essentially founded modern Chinese literature. His stories diagnosed Chinese society's self-defeating traditions with a surgical rage. "The True Story of Ah Q" is one of the most politically influential stories of the 20th century.
The two competing English translations split opinion hard: the older Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang version reads as too polished for some, smoothing over Lu Xun's plain, direct style. Readers who prefer Julia Lovell's newer translation still complain “the prose at times feels disjointed.” Old Stories Retold, the mythological section, is the part readers most often skip or dislike; one admits needing “an expert to hold my hand through each” story without a synopsis of the myth behind it. Despite being the most famous entry, The True Story of Ah Q gets named by several readers as their least favorite, more admired at a distance than loved on the page. One reviewer says flatly the writing is “too often verbose, literary, and quaint.” Read straight through, the short, bleak village stories start to blur together rather than build.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
