With the Kickstarter campaign for launching Don Quixote as the first Restless Classic well underway, Restless Books is pleased to announce the next four books due to get the same treatment—deluxe editions, new supplementary content and context, and interactive features with passionate teachers via video series and online book club discussions. These timeless works still speak to our time and place—and especially to our “restlessness.” We’ll be bringing them back in splendid fashion, and we hope you’ll join us for the conversation.
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
This classic about a shipwreck survivor—often framed as as a parable of English pluck and industry (and cannibals)—is due for a reboot. Written in 1719 during the crescendo of the British empire, the book has fascinating things to tell us about colonialism and globalization. The Restless Classics edition will include perspectives on the book from writers and thinkers across the world and history whose own cultural inheritance was shaped by imperial expansion.
The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois
Born in Massachusetts three years after the abolition of slavery, W.E.B. Dubois’s life as an activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar spanned the the course of civil rights history from emancipation to the marches and movements of the 1960s. Unprecedented in its time, his monumental work The Souls of Black Folk remains a profound and essential exploration of questions of race, justice, and the human spirit. The restless classics edition will explore what Dubois’s wisdom can still teach us today.
Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
No, you’ve been getting it all wrong: The doctor is Frankenstein; the one with the bolts in its neck is Frankenstein’s monster. Wait, he doesn’t have bolts in his neck? We’ll have to revisit this grotesque, thrilling tale that spawned the horror and science fiction genres, and still resonates with today’s debates about the limits and frightening power of science and human ambition.
Poems, Protest, and a Dream, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
The original badass nun, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote this fierce injunction against the bishop who wanted to stymie her intellectual pursuits in the 1600s, during a time when the Spanish empire (in what would later become Mexico) gave little credence to women’s capabilities. This remarkable collection is a foundational work not only of feminism, but also of Hispanic literature.