A Call to Arms · The True Story of Ah Q

This collection brings together Lu Xun’s first stories, published in the years just after the fall of the empire. A man reads in the history books that his neighbours eat people, a down-at-heel scholar clings to his dignity in a tavern, a father buys his son a remedy soaked in blood. The True Story of Ah Q, the longest, follows a village labourer who turns every humiliation into an imaginary victory. Together the stories explore the servitude of habit and the gap between words and deeds. Lu Xun writes in the spoken language, in a dry prose that refuses consolation.