Don Quixote

A 400-year-old novel that explains what happens when a person builds a self from stories.

In a village in La Mancha, a retired gentleman named Alonso Quixano reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind. He renames himself Don Quixote de la Mancha, puts on a rusty suit of armor, and rides out to right the world's wrongs. His neighbor Sancho Panza follows along as squire, lured by the promise of an island to govern.

Why this abridgment?

Don Quixote is the most-translated work of fiction ever published, after the Bible. It is also one of the least-finished. The standard English translations run over 1,000 pages - long enough that most readers give up somewhere around page 200, before the story deepens into something genuinely moving. This abridged and modernized edition condenses Cervantes' masterpiece to about a quarter of its original length, cutting the digressions while keeping every plot point and joke. Don Quixote still speaks in his gloriously absurd elevated style; everyone else talks like normal people. That contrast is the comedy, and it's fully intact.

What to expect

Part One is the slapstick: Quixote mistakes windmills for giants, an inn for a castle, a barber's basin for a legendary helmet. Part Two is where Cervantes shifts your sympathy - Quixote and Sancho enter a world where everyone has already read their story, and the people who mock them become the real fools. By the final chapters, it is genuinely devastating.

About this edition

Based on John Ormsby's acclaimed 1885 English translation - modernized for contemporary readers and printed in the Japanese bunkobon pocket format (A6, 105×148mm), designed to be carried and read anywhere. Funny, surprising, and more modern than it has any right to be.

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