This fall, join us as we read Don Quixote with our virtual classics book club, Restless Reads, together with the New York Public Library and the Jones Library in Amherst. We’ll be in good company: our guide will be Ilan Stavans, a noted Cervantes scholar and devotee (and our publisher). We’ll tackle this bucket-list book a little at a time, about eight pages a day, with monthly virtual meetings hosted by Stavans along the way, wrapping up by early December. During an uncertain fall, the restless, struggling, dreaming figure of Don Quixote will be a good friend.
“I have honestly lost count of how many times I have read Don Quixote of La Mancha. The first time was in my native Mexico City, in my late teens. I didn’t much like it…. Sometime in my mid-thirties, after telling a friend I would never go back to Don Quixote, I suddenly realized I was wrong and, as if under a spell, felt the urge to reopen the book. I frantically devoured it in a couple of sleepless sessions. Since then, I have dutifully returned to Cervantes’s novel in periodic cycles, each time sensing anew its sheer magic…. Its pages are fluid, inexhaustible, growing as I grow.
“This is a book for all seasons. It feels to me as if it has always been needed as a way to mend the world, perhaps today more than ever, modernity being both a blessing and a curse, as our sense of self undergoes heavy pressure to conform, to lose its uniqueness.” —Ilan Stavans
Prepare to read and discuss with us by downloading our free Don Quixote reading group guide.
Reading & meeting schedule
© Eko, from Don Quixote of La Mancha: 400th Anniversary Edition
Thursday, September 10 at 8 pm ET
Part One, chapters I–XXXV
pp. 25–307 in our Restless Classics edition
Register through the New York Public Library; you don’t need to be a patron to register. You’ll receive the Google Meet link in advance.
Thursday, October 8 at 8 pm ET
Part One, chapters XXVI-LII
pp. 308–450 in our edition
Register through the New York Public Library; you don’t need to be a patron to register.
Thursday, November 12 at 8 pm ET
Part Two, chapters I-XXXVI
pp. 451–684 in our edition
Register through the New York Public Library; you don’t need to be a patron to register.
Thursday, December 10 at 8 pm ET
Part Two, chapters XXXVII-LXXIV
pp. 685–908 in our edition
Registration link to come.
Register through the New York Public Library.
Any edition of Don Quixote will do. Ours is a special 400th-anniversary edition, with illustrations by Eko and an introduction by Ilan Stavans. Find it on our website and use the code BUYDIRECT to get 15% off. It’s also available at your local indie bookstore or on Bookshop.
About the Host
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."
About the Book
About the Author
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain's greatest literary figure, was born in Alcalá de Henares, a small town near Madrid, in 1547. He served as a soldier in the Spanish army, fighting in the Battle of Lepanto, where he received serious wounds and lost the use of his left hand. He was captured by Barbary pirates on a return journey to Spain from Italy in 1575 and spent five years imprisoned in Algiers. After his release, he worked as a government official and wrote plays, poetry, and fiction. The first part of Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in 1605, to immediate success, and the second part in 1615. He died in Madrid on April 23, 1616.
About the Illustrator
Born in Mexico in 1958, Eko is an engraver and painter. His wood etchings, often erotic in nature and the focus of controversial discussion, are part of a broader tradition in Mexican folk art popularized by José Guadalupe Posada. He has collaborated on projects for The New York Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Spanish daily El País, in addition to having published numerous books in Mexico and Spain.
by Miguel de Cervantes
Translated from the Spanish by John Ormsby
Introduction and Video Lecture Series by Ilan Stavans
Illustrations by Eko
Restless Classics
Newly introduced by leading Quixote scholar Ilan Stavans, this 400th Anniversary edition of Don Quixote of La Mancha—called the most popular book in history after the Bible and the first modern novel—inaugurates Restless Classics: interactive encounters with great books and inspired teachers. Each Restless Classic is beautifully designed with original artwork, a new introduction for the trade audience, and an online video teaching series led by passionate experts.
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632060754
Publication date: October 6, 2015