"[A] book of manners for the debauched. Its readers in the late Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers."
Amy Tan, New York Times Book Review Praise for Volume 1: "[I]t is time to remind ourselves that The Plum in the Golden Vase is not just about sex, whether the numerous descriptions of sexual acts throughout the novel be viewed ... Read moreas titillating, harshly realistic, or, in Mr. Roy's words, intended 'to express in the most powerful metaphor available to him the author's contempt for the sort of persons who indulge in them.' The novel is a sprawling panorama of life and times in urban China, allegedly set safely in the Sung dynasty, but transparently contemporary to the author's late sixteenth-century world, as scores of internal references demonstrate. The eight hundred or so men, women, and children who appear in the book cover a breath-taking variety of human types, and encompass pretty much every imaginable mood and genre
from sadism to tenderness, from light humor to philosophical musings, from acute social commentary to outrageous satire."
Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books Praise for Volume 1: "Racy, colloquial, and robustly scatalogical, [this translation] could only have been done now, when our literary language has finally shed its Victorian values. David Tod Roy enters with zest into the spirit and the letter of the original, quite surpassing ... earlier versions."
Paul St. John Mackintosh, Literary Review Praise for Volume 1: "Reading Roy's translation is a remarkable experience."
Robert Chatain, Chicago Tribune Review of Books Show Less