[3] The book contains around 1,130 historical anecdotes and character sketches of around 600 literati, musicians and painters who lived in the Han and Wei–Jin periods (2nd-4th centuries).
[3][4] While most of the anecdotes and personalities are attested in other sources, traditional Chinese bibliographers did not classify Shishuo Xinyu as history, but as a novel / "minor tales" (小说 xiao shuo), a term that was later used to refer to fiction.
The mixture of literary and vernacular styles set the scene for the later tradition of informal Chinese literature.
The 20th-century Chinese novelist Lu Xun spoke highly of the book's aesthetic merits.
[5][6] The text was fully translated into English in 2002, with the Liang dynasty (502–557) commentary by Liu Xiaobiao (劉孝標), by sinologist Richard B. Mather, in the book titled Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World.