William H Nienhauser, Jr. is Halls-Bascom Professor of Classical Chinese Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His publications include the two-volume Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature and six volumes of translations from the Shiji (The Grand Scribe's Records). In 1979 he was a founding editor of Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), which he edited until 2009. Nienhauser has taught or conducted research at several universities in Germany, Academia Sinica, Kyoto University, National Taiwan University, and Peking University. In addition to grants from American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright–Hays, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Research Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2003 he was awarded a Forschungspreis (Research Prize) for lifetime achievement from the Humboldt Foundation.

This volume supplements Tang Tales, A Guided Reader (Volume 1; 2010) and presents twelve more Tang tales, going beyond the standard corpus of these narratives to include six stories translated into English for the first time. The rich annotation and translator's notes for these twelve tales provide insights into many aspects of Tang material culture and medieval thought, including Buddhism and Daoism.

In addition to meticulously annotated translations, the book offers original texts (with some textual notes), and commentaries in the form of translator's notes, thereby joining the first volume of Tang tales as the only collections that introduce students to Tang tales while also challenging specialists interested in the field.