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…

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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:…

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New Paperback: Journey to the West, in English!

June 12, 2023 – Posted in: Journey to the West, Just Released

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.

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