Kai Lung’s Golden Hours
Ernest Bramah’s mock-Chinese fantasy returns to Kai Lung, the wandering storyteller whose only weapon is his tongue. Arrested on trumped-up charges of treason and hauled before the corrupt Mandarin Shan Tien, Kai Lung stalls his sentence the one way he knows how, by spinning tale after tale, each one postponing judgment while he plays for time, freedom, and the affections of a watching maiden. The stories nest inside one another like carved boxes, told in an ornate, ceremoniously polite English full of proverbs and sly understatement that admirers have quoted for a century. This is fantasy less about magic than about wit, patience, and the survival value of a good story. Long regarded as the finest of the Kai Lung books, it is free to read as a PDF and EPUB.
