An imaginary country of cats where no one yields the right of way, where foreigners are both feared and treated with an undeserved amount of respect, and where the food is toxic – this could be a modern fable, but it is a novel published in 1932 by Lao She, one of China's most famed 20th-century writers.

"Cat Country," considered by some to be the first Chinese science-fiction novel, is out next month in a new edition as part of Penguin China's Modern Classics series. A second Lao She book, "Mr. Ma and Son," first published in 1929, is also being made available in English this month for the first time in many years. Both are part of Penguin's bet that there is a growing market for English translations of Chinese literature.

"Cat Country" is a dystopian story that reads like a hybrid of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984," a thinly veiled condemnation of Chinese society that predicts a world of corruption, violence and xenophobia.

Publication of the books is "long overdue," says Jo Lusby, Penguin China's managing director. In addition, Penguin's release of the two books as part of its Modern Classics series is "the right platform to promote him and his reputation as being somewhat essential reading if you want to understand the contemporary Chinese psyche."

"It's really high time these books were republished," agrees Anne Witchard of the University of Westminster in London, author of last year's "Lao She in London," an account of the writer's time in London from 1924-29.

Especially in the case of "Mr. Ma and Son" -- a semi-autobiographical novel about the lives of Chinese immigrants in a racist and sinophobic London -- "Lao She is the only voice that describes that period," she says. "He deserves to be brought to wider attention."

Penguin

The "Cat Country" to be published is a revived version of a 1970 translation, while "Mr. Ma" offers an out-of-print translation that is better than was previously available, says Ms. Witchard. "It captures the period and the flavor very well

Lao She was one of China's greatest writers of a "new vernacular Chinese, not the old literary style," says novelist Koonchung Chan, author of "The Fat Years," another dystopian novel, published in 2011 and banned in mainland China. Lao She, Mr. Chan says, wrote his best novels after returning to China from the U.K.

"Cat Country" is a "very bleak view on the China of his time," Mr. Chan says. "It's on people's cowardice, betraying each other, and trying to indulge themselves in a kind of hallucinatory world and finding peace with that."

Whether the books will find a wide readership is open for debate. A recent article in the People's Daily proclaimed that HarperCollins' $60,000 payment for the English version of Xiao Bai's novel "Zu Jie" (to be published as "The Foreign Concession") is a "part of a trend signaling increased interest in Chinese literature" from the West.

But some are skeptical Lao She will be one to lead that trend.

"I can't imagine it will sell a whole lot," says Eric Abrahamsen, editor of Pathlight magazine, which publishes Chinese literature in English translation. "There's awareness of Lao She in academia, but among readers, I don't think there's much awareness at all."

Penguin

Then there's the problem of the writing. Journalist Ian Johnson, who wrote the introduction to the new edition of "Cat Country," says there's "no way to sugarcoat" the truth that "Cat Country" is not a great novel. Nevertheless, he says he "found it disturbingly compelling as a dissection of China's problems and as a prophecy for China's future direction. Lao She couldn't have intended it to be so, but the book is eerie in how almost everything that is shown comes true in the coming decades."

And there is a growing popularity of science-fiction among young Chinese, says Mr. Chan.

"Mass readers love these time-machine stories," he says. In fact, they've become so popular that TV shows involving time travel have been banned.

Much of the popular work is escapist entertainment, but there are also more writers now "trying to come up with serious science-fiction," he says.

For Lao She, whatever surge in popularity he enjoys now comes long after his death. At the time of his death, Mr. Abrahamsen says, Lao She was a top candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But the intellectual fell under suspicion in 1966 during the Cultural Revolution and was attacked as a counterrevolutionary. After being humiliated and beaten in Beijing, he reportedly drowned himself in Beijing's Taiping Lake. In 1978, he was posthumously rehabilitated by the Communist Party.

--Debra Bruno

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Correction: "Cat Country" will be published in September and "Mr. Ma and Son" will be published this month. An earlier version of this article had the dates switched.