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The Novel and the World
W.W. Norton
September 2015
On Sale: September 8, 2015
212 pages
ISBN: 0393083020
EAN: 9780393083026
Kindle: B00TG24BF8
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
A 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 Manchaβan ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into βa knight in skirts.β Freud studied Quixoteβs 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 todayβs 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.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - September 8, 2015
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