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We’re happy to announce our first full length book in English! It’s a translation and retelling of the first 50 chapters of the classic Chinese novel 封神榜, known in the west as The Investiture of the Gods. The Investiture of the Gods is one of the most famous novels in classic Chinese literature. It is a gripping tale of powerful gods, scheming mortals and epic battles, but it also explores the dilemma faced by loyal…
At last, the second book in our Last King of Shang series is finished and available for purchase! The title is, not surprisingly, The Last King of Shang, Book 2. It covers the events in chapters 18 through 34 of the original epic Chinese novel Investiture of the Gods. Here is a short blurb from the back cover: In ancient China, the Shang kingdom descends into chaos as Daji, the beautiful thousand year old fox…
I promised that the second installment of The Last King of Shang would be out by end of August. We’re going to miss that target by a month. Here’s why. The book is pretty much written. But I decided that it would be fun to include the short introductory poem that the original author provided at the start of each chapter. We didn’t do that for Book 1, but we will do it for all…
A couple of weeks ago, a reader contacted us and asked for the vocabulary list for Rise of the Monkey King, so she could load it into one of her language learning apps. That seemed like a neat idea. So we’ve added a new link, “Download Vocabulary List,” to most of our fiction books on the home page. Find the book you want, click the link, and you’ll be able to download the complete vocabulary…
We’ve been working on a new series of graded readers based on 封神榜 , commonly known as Investiture of the Gods. We just released the first of six volumes. One of our biggest challenges has been to find a high quality English translation to work from. Our writing process for 封神榜 and 西游记 (Journey to the West) has been for me (Jeff) to write the English version first, adapting the story to make sure that…
I realized recently that we had just about everything needed to publish an English language version of Journey to the West. Each of the 31 books in the Chinese language series already included English translations. So all we had to do was combine those 31 texts into a single manuscript, clean up the text so it read as a single work instead of 31 different works, add the illustrations, do all the usual layout and design work, and publish it. Once that was done, we had to convert it to ebook format, since about 1/3 of all our book sales are now ebooks. Altogether, the project was finished in about three weeks.
We’ve selected the famous epic novel Investiture of the Gods for our next project. This is another long and complex story, set in ancient China at the time of the fall of the Shang Dynasty in 1050 BC. It’s about a foolish young king who falls in love with a goddess and writes a highly offensive love poem to her on her temple wall. Furious, the goddess dispatches a thousand year old fox demon to replace the soul of Daji, a beautiful young woman. The fox demon seduces the king and leads him down the path of destruction for himself and his kingdom.
The book has lots of action and adventure in it, but it also explores the inner conflict of those who are loyal to the kingdom but are confronted by a king who no longer deserves their loyalty.
Good news: we have converted all 31 JTW books from Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese characters.
And just to finish off the special editions, we also have partnered with Audible and Findaway Voices to offer the complete Journey to the West as an audiobook. The audiobook is nearly 37 hours long.
Are you feeling pretty good about your Chinese reading ability? We have a challenge for you! We just released the complete Journey to the West in a 1-volume paperback, in Simplified Chinese. It has no reading aids — no pinyin and no English. Just Chinese!
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