Book: The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China by Lu Xun

That's what Time magazine recently called our first modern Chinese classic, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China, which collects the complete fiction of Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun was a writer of satirical brilliance. He studied to be a doctor before realizing it wasn't the bodies of his countrymen that needed curing, but their minds and spirits, and he became the self-appointed literary physician of China's spiritual ills. Yet for all Lu Xun's criticism of China, Chairman Mao commandeered him in service of the Cultural Revolution, calling him "the saint of modern China," and giving rise to Lu Xun museums, plays, TV adaptations, wine brands, a Lu Xun Day on the national calendar, and a theme park offering tourists the "Lu Xun experience." His stories, newly—and brilliantly—translated by Julia Lovell, are published here in the only edition available of his complete fiction, and with an afterword by Yiyun Li, the award-winning author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, who also studied to be a doctor before turning to writing fiction.