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…
Continue readingA 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…
Continue readingWe’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…
Continue readingI 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.
Continue readingWe’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.
Continue readingGood news: we have converted all 31 JTW books from Simplified Chinese to Traditional Chinese characters.
Continue readingAre 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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