Don Quixote (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Widely acknowledged as the first modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote features two of the most famous characters ever created: Don Quixote, the tall, bewildered, and half-crazy knight, and Sancho Panza, his rotund and incorrigibly loyal squire. The comic and unforgettable dynamic between these two legendary figures has served as the blueprint for countless novels written since Cervantes’s time.

An immediate success when first published in 1604, Don Quixote tells the story of a middle-aged Spanish gentleman who, obsessed with the chivalrous ideals found in romantic books, decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. Seated upon his lean nag of a horse, and accompanied by the pragmatic Sancho Panza, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain seeking glory and grand adventure. Along the way the duo meet a dazzling assortment of characters whose diverse beliefs and perspectives reveal how reality and imagination are frequently indistinguishable.

Profound, powerful, and hilarious, Don Quixote continues to capture the imaginations of audiences all over the world.

Features illustrations by Gustave Doré.

Carole Slade specializes in late medieval and early modern European literature.Her publications include St. Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life and Approaches to Teaching Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. She teaches Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Customer Reviews:

Perfection

By Paul Frandano - May 14, 2009

Simply to echo the views of other reviewers: this is no dry academic translation of Cervantes' wildly comic Ur-novel. It is a priceless, peerless work of art in itself, and if it falls short in literalness, it brims with life, wisdom, genius...what can you say about a book that's lasted 400 years, in a translation that's 250 years old and still selling well, in new editions (even though it's on the Internet as a big fat freebie)? Why even review something so CERTIFIABLY GREAT? Only in the hope, I think, that you might nudge someone into reading something they might otherwise just set aside as one of those gray musty tomes everyone talks about but hardly anyone still reads.

(And the Modern Library edition, by the bye, is very nicely mounted in mass market and (particularly handsome) trade editions, with an interesting introduction by Carlos Fuentes and a useful set of notes that explain Smollett's language when a word or phrase bounces off contemporary comprehension.)... read more

Smollett translation

By George H. - December 17, 2007

I have looked at a number of translations of Don Quixote. I don't know why this tranlation is often passed over. It is my favorite by far and I think it stands on its own as a masterpiece. I can't imagine the original language surpassing it.

Without discretion there can be no humor

By Eric Robert Juggernaut - July 15, 2008

'Don Quixote' is largely considered to be a satire on the popular chivalric ballads of Cervantes' day, but don't be fooled. This novel is no satire on chivalry, itself. Indeed, through the trials of Quixote and Sancho Panza, Cervantes is perhaps the greatest promoter of chivalric ideas that the West has ever known. No other protagonist so thoroughly embodies the ideals of heroism, romantic love, friendship, honor, discretion, trust, virtue, and adventure than does Don Quixote. It just so happens that he is insane, but the author is able to look beyond that. So too should the reader.

The knight's sallies are absolutely delightful and, it must be credited, alone prove Cervantes' genius in writing. The dialogue between Quixote and Sancho is excellent comedy, creating a duo that has gone unsurpassed in originality and endearment for five centuries. "Is it possible that Your Worship can be so thick skulled and brainless as to not perceive the truth of what I allege?"... read more