a Chinese writer of the Ming Dynasty. He is best known for his vernacular short fiction collections Slapping the Table in Amazement, I and II. Ling’s short stories were a detailed study of his 17th century moral world. Ling was strongly influenced by Feng Menglong, whose success emboldened him to publish commercially. In the prefatory material to his first short story collection he insisted it was infinitely more difficult to paint a likeness of a dog or horse one had actually seen than to render a ghost or goblin one had never observed.
