Selected Short Fiction
Lu Xun · 1918
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 case against
Diagnosis was the mission, and it shows: these stories read like case files on a sick society, the patient always China around 1920, which means footnotes or bafflement for everyone else. Lu Xun gave fiction barely a decade before turning wholly to the polemical essay, so the shelf is thin and the bleakness total. Admire him, learn from him; warmth lives elsewhere.
Short Stories · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
