Description: The Story of the Stone is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature. This book is a straightforward guide to a complex classic. Each chapter of the companion summarizes and comments on each chapter of the novel, providing English-speaking readers with the cultural context to enjoy the story and understand its world.
Review Quotes: Brave readers embarking on The Story of the Stone--China's grandest, most complex, and most inspiring work of literature--will be greatly assisted by this welcome guide, both for its admirably succinct summary of the novel's plot and for its thought-provoking commentary, by lifelong Stone aficionados Susan Chan Egan and Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung.--John Minford, translator of The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, volumes 4 and 5