Don Quixote - eBook

Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of Don Quixote. He died on April 23, 1616.

Edith Grossman is the award-winning translator of major works by many of Latin America's most important writers. Born in Philadelphia, she attended the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Berkeley before receiving her PhD from New York University. She lives in New York City.

“What a unique monument is this book!…How its creative genius, critical, free, and human, soars above its age!” - Thomas Mann
“It is thrilling to add Grossman’s to the bookshelf of Don Quixote possibilities. Her rendition confirms that Cervantes’ imperfect masterpiece is as much at home in Shakespeare’s tongue as it is in Spanish.” - Los Angeles Times
“This new version of Don Quixote is thoroughly modern...the words are familiar, the humor’s intact.” - Austin American-Statesman
Timeless Praise for Don Quixote: “Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era…. The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes. Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being, and yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?” - Milan Kundera
“Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. [He] 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….He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon.” - Vladimir Nabokov
“The Grossman translation blows the dust off Cervantes, leaving his light-footed prose and his sly, gentle mockeries.” - Dallas Morning News
“[Edith Grossman’s] rendering of Cervantes’ prose conveys all of its complex subtleties in a fresh and attractive style that is neither overly traditional nor colloquial.” - San Diego Union-Tribune
“This new translation relates the story of the man of La Mancha and his vivid imagination in a way that is more in tune with a 21st-century reader.” - Los Angeles Daily News
“Marvelous new translation.” - The New Yorker
“Grossman has given us an honest, robust and freshly revelatory Quixote for our times” - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A major literary achievement.” - New York Times Book Review
“Ms. Grossman…has provided a Quixote that is agile, playful, formal and wry…. What she renders splendidly is the book’s very heart.” - New York Times
“It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.” - Lionel Trilling