Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years. With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. This Penguin Classics edition, with its beautiful new cover design, includes John Rutherford's masterly translation, which does full justice to the energy and wit of Cervantes's prose, as well as a brilliant critical introduction by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarriá.
" Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being," said novelist Milan Kundera. "And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?" ----Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. This Modern Library edition presents the acclaimed Samuel Putnam translation of the epic tale, complete with notes, variant readings, and an Introduction by the translator. ----The debt owed to Cervantes by literature is immense. From Milan Kundera: "Cervan- tes is the founder of the Modern Era. . . . The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes." Lionel Trilling observed: "It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote." Vladmir Nabo-kov wrote: "Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality. . . . He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon." And V. S. Pritchett observed: "Don Quixote begins as a province, turns into Spain, and ends as a universe. . . . The true spell of Cervantes is that he is a natural magician in pure story-telling." The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun- dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.
"Diana de Armas Wilson's introductory study captures the true essence of why Cervantes's novel has become a valuable piece of our shared cultural heritage. Humour, satire, and the religious and political conflicts that plagued the era all form part of Cervantes's great vision, and Wilson's study provides thorough analysis of why we still want to read the adventures of his would-be knight errant and his loyal squire over four centuries later." --AARON KAHN, University of Sussex
Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf.Volume XIV features the work recently named by the Nobel Institute as the greatest book of all time: Don Quixote of the Mancha, Part 1, by Spanish novelist MIGUEL DE CERVANTES (1547-1616). The picaresque adventures of a delusional would-be knight have, over the centuries, been taken as farce, satire, psychological drama, and social commentary, and have inspired writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky. Straddling the writings of the Renaissance and modern literature, it is considered the first modern novel.
Finalist for the 2019 Whistler Independent Book Awards, Semi-finalist for 2019 Kindle Book Awards, Literary Fiction, and Honorable Mention 2020 Writers' Digest Self-Published Book Awards. In this family saga, love and loss are bound together by a country always at war During WWI, Lukia Mazurets, a Ukrainian farmwife, delivers her eighth child while her husband is serving in the Tsar’s army. Soon after, she and her children are forced to flee the invading Germans. Over the next fourteen years, Lukia must rely on her wits and faith to survive life in a refugee camp, the ravages of a typhus epidemic, the Bolshevik revolution, unimaginable losses, and one daughter’s forbidden love. Sunflowers Under Fire is a heartbreakingly intimate novel that illuminates the strength of the human spirit. Based on the true stories of her grandmother’s ordeals, author Diana Stevan captures the voices of those who had little say in a country that is still being fought over.
James Montgomery's new translation of Don Quixote is the fourth already in the twenty-first century, and it stands with the best of them. It pays particular attention to what may be the hardest aspect of Cervantes's novel to render into English: the humorous passages, particularly those that feature a comic and original use of language. Cervantes would be proud. --Howard Mancing, Professor of Spanish, Purdue University and Vice President, Cervantes Society of America
Don Quixote, errant knight and sane madman, with the company of his faithful squire and wise fool, Sancho Panza, together roam the world and haunt readers' imaginations as they have for nearly four hundred years.
