Our virtual classics book club continues this June with Robinson Crusoe, a perfect choose-your-own-adventure reading experience: it’s a gripping story of peril and survival and ultimate isolation (relatable!). And it’s also an unparalleled portrait of the colonizer and his gaze, his self-mythology, and his rampaging appetite. As Jamaica Kincaid writes in her introduction to our Restless Classics edition, “Dear Mr. Crusoe: please stay home.”
Get your copy and join us for two discussion sessions on June 11 and 18. Co-hosted by the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library and the Jones Library in Amherst, MA, our discussions will be led by Ilan Stavans, our publisher and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. We’ll meet via Google Meet. To get the juices flowing before we meet, check out our free Robinson Crusoe reading group guide here.
Here’s how to join us:
Our Restless Classics edition features illustrations by Eko, an engraver and painter from Mexico.
Get your copy of Robinson Crusoe. Our 300th-anniversary Restless Classics edition features beautiful illustrations by Eko and a new introduction by Jamaica Kincaid. Find it here on Bookshop, which is a great place to buy books these days—they’re a new platform that gives over 75% of its profit margin straight to independent bookstores. You can also find it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, iTunes, Kobo, Nook, your local bookstore, or your local library.
2. Join us for two virtual book club meetings via Google Meet, led by Ilan Stavans:
Thursday, June 11 at 8 pm EDT
What to read: The Introduction through “Finds Print of Man’s Foot on Sand” (up to p. 186 in our edition)
Please register through the New York Public Library’s website here; a link to the event will be sent via email a day in advance. You don’t need to be a patron of the NYPL to register.
Thursday, June 18 at 8 pm EDT
What to read: “A Cave Retreat” through “Fight Between Friday and a Bear” (pp. 187–347 in our edition)
Please register through the New York Public Library’s website here; a link to the event will be sent via email a day in advance. You don’t need to be a patron of the NYPL to register.
About the Book
About the Author
© National Maritime Museum, London
Daniel Defoe (c. 1660–1731) was an English writer, journalist, and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel, Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain. In some texts he is even referred to as one of the founders, if not the founder, of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism.
About the Introducer
© Ann Summa
Jamaica Kincaid is a Caribbean American writer whose essays, stories, and novels are evocative portrayals of family relationships and her native Antigua. Settling in New York City when she left Antigua at age 16, she became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1976. Her books include the short story collection At the Bottom of the River (1983), the novels Annie John (1984) and Lucy (1990), the three-part essay A Small Place (1988), the novel The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and nonfiction book My Brother (1997). Her “Talk of the Town” columns for The New Yorker were collected in Talk Stories (2001), and in 2005 she published Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya. Her most recent book is the novel See Now Then (2013). She is a professor in the department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and lives in Vermont.
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 Daniel Defoe
Introduction by Jamaica Kincaid
Illustrations by Eko
Restless Classics
Restless Classics presents the Three-Hundredth Anniversary Edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic Caribbean adventure story and foundational English novel, with new illustrations by Eko and an introduction by Jamaica Kincaid that recontextualizes the book for our globalized, postcolonial era.
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632061195
Publication date: Aug 27, 2019