new book: Chang’e the Moon Goddess

May 4, 2025 – Posted in: Uncategorized

We just released the second book in our new series, Heroes of Ancient China. It’s called Chang’e the Moon Goddess, and it’s written by the best-selling team of Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. Here’s the back cover blurb: Chang’e, eldest daughter of a powerful sky god, makes a foolish mistake and is exiled from the heavenly world, condemned to live out her days as an earthbound mortal. The archer Hou Yi dives through the…

What We’re Working On

April 28, 2025 – Posted in: Uncategorized

Just wanted to let everyone know what we are working on… Things are looking really good for the new “Heroes of Ancient China” series. The first book, Nezha, has been a surprising success, and is now our 2nd best-selling book (after Dao De Jing in Clear English, our perennial best-seller). Encouraged by that, we have four more books in various stages of completion: Chang’e Goddess of the Moon, Yu the Great, Nuwa the Creator, and…

New book: Nezha

February 27, 2025 – Posted in: Just Released

We’re delighted to announce the arrival of Nezha, the first book in a new series called Heroes of Ancient China. This series will feature mortals and gods from Chinese mythology, with each book written using a restricted vocabulary of around 500 words. Here’s a quick summary of the book: Born with miraculous powers and a fearless spirit, young Nezha is destined for greatness, but his path is far from easy. From his legendary battle with…

New book: Six Ghost Stories in Easy Chinese

February 23, 2025 – Posted in: Just Released

Another month, another graded reader! We just published another book of classic short stories in easy Chinese. It’s Six Ghost Stories in Easy Chinese, based on stories written by Pu Songling and published in 1766 as Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio). They’ve been retold by Yunjie Xiong, who lives in China and has been writing and translating for the past six years. Her work is really good! Here are the stories:…

Wordcount List

January 25, 2025 – Posted in: Uncategorized

Many of our readers are interested in selecting books based on the total number of different Chinese words used to tell the story. So I thought it would be useful to list all our fiction books and show the Chinese vocabulary total for each. The list is at the bottom of this post. There’s quite a range in vocabulary size, from our beginning reader “Twenty Three Cats” with just 101 words, up to the complete…

Just published: The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl

January 20, 2025 – Posted in: Uncategorized

We just published our first totally new story in almost a year. It’s the classic Chinese legend The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl (牛郎织女). This is a wonderful story, told using fewer than 500 Chinese words, most of which are in the HSK3 vocabulary list. While most versions of this story are short, our version comes in at 15,000 Chinese characters, which works out to about 10,000 words. The book is 225 pages long. As usual, the…

Emperor mixup!

January 4, 2025 – Posted in: Journey to the West

Well, I’m embarassed. It turns out that we had a pretty serious error in The Emperor in Hell, the fifth book in our 31-book Journey to the West series, and it took five years for anyone to notice it. If you’re familiar with the story, you know that the Dragon King of the Jing River, who is responsible for bringing rain, is horrified to learn that a fortune-teller is giving advice to a fisherman on how…

Black Friday Deal – 33% discount on our most popular books

November 24, 2024 – Posted in: Investiture of the Gods, Journey to the West, Last King of Shang

From now through December 10 2024, you can get our most popular series of graded readers – Journey to the West and Last King of Shang – in paperback, for a really low price. You get 33% off the regular price, with no sales tax and free shipping to the US and Canada. This offer is for the following three sets of books: The Journey to the West – All 31 Individual Books in the Series, In Simplified OR Traditional Chinese, Pinyin and…

What books should we publish next?

November 13, 2024 – Posted in: Uncategorized

Now that we’ve finished our two-year Last King of Shang project, we’re taking a short break for the holidays. But I’m thinking about what we should do next. Right now we are not looking to take on another huge project (sorry, no Romance of the Three Kingdoms!). But I am interested in publishing a series of short graded readers geared towards the lower end of reading ability, say around 500 to 800 word vocabulary. Ideally…

2 new coffee-table books: The Journey to the West and The Last King of Shang

November 9, 2024 – Posted in: Investiture of the Gods, Journey to the West, Last King of Shang

We’ve just released two oversized hardcover books that will make perfect gifts. They are the complete versions of our two best-selling Chinese novels, “Journey to the West” and “The Last King of Shang” (based on Investiture of the Gods). For both novels, we’ve converted the entire story – in Simplified Chinese, pinyin and English – into a single very large book. Each book is 8.5″ wide, 11″ high, and weighs over 5 pounds. Because the…

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