Don Quixote [Paperback]

Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’sThe Great American Read

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 Quixotehas 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. The highest creation of genius has been achieved by Shakespeare and Cervantes, almost alone. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A more profound and powerful work than this is not to be met with...The final and greatest utterance of the human mind. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What a monument is this book! How its creative genius, critical, free, and human, soars above its age! —Thomas Mann

Don Quixote 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....The parody has become a paragon. —Vladimir Nabokov