A Call to Arms · The True Story of Ah Q

This collection gathers Lu Xun's first stories, written soon after the fall of the empire. A man reads in the history books that his neighbours eat people; a failed scholar clings to his dignity in a wine shop; a mother buys her son a remedy soaked in blood. The True Story of Ah Q, the longest piece, follows a village labourer who turns every humiliation into an imagined victory. Together they explore the servitude of habit and the gap between words and deeds. Lu Xun writes in the spoken language, in dry prose that refuses comfort.