Language: English | Category: Novel (Adventures) | Audio Book: Not Available

Don Quixote is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. It follows the adventures of a nameless hidalgo (at the end of Part II given the name Alonso Quixano) who reads so many chivalric novels that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote’s rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is, and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story. The story implements various themes, such as intertextuality, realism, metatheatre, and literary representation.

Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published, such as the Bokklubben World Library collection which cites Don Quixote as authors’ choice for the “best literary work ever written”, and has been translated into more languages than any book other than the Bible. It has had major influence on the literary community.

This is the story that a Nobel Prize Committee survey of one hundred of the world’s best writers named “the greatest book of all time.” DON QUIXOTE is the biggest-selling book of fiction ever written. It has sold more than 500 million copies.

“There is nothing more profound or powerful than this piece of fiction. It is still the finest and greatest expression of human thought, the most bitter irony that a man is capable of uttering.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“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 its sheer vitality.” – Vladimir Nabokov

“The highest creation of genius has been achieved by Shakespeare and Cervantes, almost alone.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“What a monument is this book. How its creative genius, critical, free and human, soars above its age.” – Thomas Mann