Admirers of the monumental original edition of Victor H. Mair`s Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature have long clamored for a shorter, more affordable version. In response, Columbia University Press now offers an abridged volume, which, like the original, includes selections of Chinese literature from the beginnings to 1919.

This shorter anthology retains the characteristics of the original in that it is arranged according to genre rather than chronology and interprets "literature" very broadly to include not just literary fiction, poetry, and drama, but folk and popular literature, lyrics and arias, elegies and rhapsodies, biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, letters, criticism and theory, and travelogues and jokes. It also contains fresh translations by newer voices in the field.