One recommendation I have (although I'm not sure if it fits the bill here) is Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature. Owen is a total genius (speaking o

One recommendation I have (although I'm not sure if it fits the bill here) is Stephen Owen's Anthology of Chinese Literature. Owen is a total genius (speaking of the Taiping Guangji, I remember sitting in a seminar with him where he'd ad-lib these incredible translations of similar stories from a slightly earlier collection that I'd struggled with for hours), and it's not often that so magnificent a scholar will write a relatively introductory work. The book is a lot broader than the one you mentioned, so the explanatory material and annotations are necessarily a little bit briefer, but I find that Owen does a good job of putting each of the works in context and pointing out particularly notable points of poetry or prose. If you do have a more specific period interest I'd be happy to provide a more accurate recommendation (although I know very little about scholarship on anything written in the last millennium or so, ha!)