Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher

QUIXOTE

Ilan Stavans

The Novel and the World

A concise but groundbreaking cultural history of the most influential, most frequently translated, and most imitated novel in the world.

The year 2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha—an ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into “a knight in skirts.” Freud studied Quixote’s psyche. Mark Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges, and Orson Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. Spain uses it as a sort of constitution and travel guide; and the Americas were conquered, then sought their independence, with the knight as a role model. In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today’s preeminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it. Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is an essayist, translator, publisher, and the author of numerous books, including A Most Imperfect Union. He lives in Massachusetts.

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Book Published 2015-09-08 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

Stavans brings infections enthusiasm and penetrating scholarship to this lively investigation of a grand novel and its readers.

Bold, imaginative, and deeply learned…. Stavans, one of our most gifted scholars of Hispanic literature, has arrived to narrate the tale of how modernity was birthed amid the whirl of windmills and all those chasing them.

A combination of celebration, meditation, and quest, Stavans’s book is bound to please el Quijote’s devoted readers and win new fans.

In this sparkling narrative, Ilan Stavans takes us on an exploration of a novel he reveres…. A fascinating, deeply enjoyable read.

Ilan Stavans, like Cervantes, tells stories of errantry: of his own travels with and through the book, of El Quijote’s journey across and around the world, of the characters’ voyages through the imaginations of creators and re-creators. The result is as engaging, funny, readable, and illuminating as the book it’s about: an idiosyncratic yet amazingly comprehensive companion, which all readers of El Quijote will want.

The impression is of abundant intelligence poured into a vessel whose aim is not tidy scholarship but joyous insight. Book lovers will relish this expansive and generous tome.

A masterly history of Don Quixote that approaches the book from multiple angles: literary, historical, cultural, linguistic, and personal. Ilan Stavans has given us a compelling, readable, and often humorous portrait of the book and its author.

If, like me, you live with the guilt of not having read Don Quixote of La Mancha, this delightful romp will inspire you to act. It is a splendid work of historiography that looks at the knight’s influence on just about everything?including the Muppets. Ilan Stavans delivers another keen-eyed, delightful tour de force.