Dear classics reader,
In this week’s mail train dog sled you will find:
A selection of novels inspired by Don Quixote;
Birthday wishes to Susan Sontag;
This week’s new classics, including a newly translated selection of Yukio Mishima stories;
A preview of coming attractions;
And our first discussion of The Call of the Wild – with a note on overland dog teams.
This newsletter may be too long for your email inbox. If so, click ‘View entire message’ at the bottom to see the full newsletter – or visit Substack.
After Don Quixote
On this day – 16 January – in 1605, a novel was published in Madrid by Francisco de Robles. It was El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, the first part of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, the book with perhaps the strongest claim to being the first modern novel in western literature.
Don Quixote chronicles the picaresque adventures of an eccentric hidalgo, or country gentleman, Alonso Quijano, who has read so many stories of chivalric romance he believes he himself is a noble knight errant: Don Quixote de La Mancha. He sets off through sixteenth-century Spain, riding his old workhorse Rocinante, with his faithful squire, the farm labourer Sancho Panza, at his side.
Don Quixote is a truly brilliant novel full of humour, pathos, digression and metatextual wit. It has also been enormously influential on the development of the novel over the last four hundred years.
To celebrate the date of its first publication, here is a list of ten novels that owe a particular debt to Cervantes and Don Quixote.
The Female Quixote, or The Adventures of Arabella by Charlotte Lennox (1752)
This vivacious and ironical novel, parodying the style of Cervantes, portrays the beautiful and aristocratic Arabella, whose passion for reading romances leads her into all manner of misunderstandings. Praised by Fielding, Richardson and Samuel Johnson, the book quickly established Charlotte Lennox as a foremost writer of the Novel of Sentiment.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 464 pages | introduced by Margaret Anne Doody | edited by Margaret Dalziel
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759-67)
Laurence Sterne’s great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first ‘postmodern’ novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate ‘hero’ Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 784 pages | introduced by Christopher Ricks | edited by Melvyn & Joan New
The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves by Tobias Smollett (1760-1)
Driven into a ‘love melancholy’ by the apparent loss of fair Aurelia Darnel, Smollett’s noble knight embarks on a series of philanthropic adventures in which, Hamlet-like, his mask of lunacy acts to point up the madness of English society, corrupted by cynicism and greed.
[out of print] Penguin Classics | 272 pages | introduced by Peter Wagner
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (1836-7)
In 1836 the 23-year-old Dickens was invited by his publishers to write `a monthly something' illustrated by sporting plates. Thus the Pickwick Club was born: its supposed `papers' soom outgrew their origins and became a brilliantly comic novel, still among Dicken's most popular works.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 784 pages | introduced by James Kinsley
Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. An ardent reader of sentimental novels, she longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery. But even her affairs bring her disappointment and the consequences are devastating. Flaubert’s erotically charged and psychologically acute portrayal of Emma Bovary caused a moral outcry on its first publication. It was deemed so lifelike that many women claimed they were the model for his heroine; but Flaubert insisted: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition | 384 pages | translated by Lydia Davis
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1868-9)
Into a compellingly real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society, Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness, and humility betray the inadequacy of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Myshkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world that is rotten, not he.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 688 pages | translated by Alan Myers | introduced by W. J. Leatherbarrow
‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ in Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (1939)
Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions introduced an entirely new voice into world literature. It is here that we find the astonishing accounts of ‘Funes the Memorious’, the man who can forget nothing; ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, who recreates Miguel de Cervantes’s epic word-for-word; a society run on the basis of an all-encompassing game of chance in ‘The Lottery in Babylon’; the mysterious world of ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ which seems to be supplanting our own; and the ‘Library of Babel’, which contains every possible book in the whole universe. Here too are the philosophical detective stories and the haunting tales of Irish revolutionaries, gaucho knife fights and dreams within dreams which proved so influential (and yet impossible to imitate). This collection was eventually to bring Borges international fame; over fifty years later, it remains endlessly intriguing.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 192 pages | translated by Andrew Hurley
[US] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition | 565 pages | translated by Andrew Hurley
Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene (1982)
With Sancho Panza, a deposed Communist mayor, his faithful Rocinate, an antiquated motorcar, Monsignor Quixote roams through modern-day Spain in a brilliant picaresque fable. Like Cervantes’ classic, Monsignor Quixote offers enduring insights into our life and times.
[UK] Vintage Classics | 208 pages | introduced by Henry Shukman
[US] Penguin Classics | 224 pages | introduced by John Auchard
‘City of Glass’ in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (1985)
City of Glass: As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written.
Ghosts: Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his own window.
The Locked Room: Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and a cache of extraordinary novels, plays, and poems. What happened to him and why is the narrator, Fanshawe’s boyhood friend, lured obsessively into his life?
Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this is a uniquely stylized trilogy of detective novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as “post-existential private eye. . . . It’s as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version.”
[UK] Faber & Faber | 320 pages
[US] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition | 320 pages | introduced by Lucy Sante
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie (2019)
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with the TV star Salman R. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where ‘Anything-Can-Happen’. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.
[UK] Vintage | 416 pages
[US] Random House | 416 pages
The book descriptions above are adapted from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Happy Birthday Susan Sontag
Today was also Susan Sontag’s birthday.
Susan Rosenblatt’s father died in China when she was five years old; she later took her stepfather’s surname, Sontag. She studied at the universities of California, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Paris before returning to the USA in 1959 and teaching philosophy of religion at Columbia in New York and writing for the Partisan Review and New York Review of Books.
She established herself as a cultural critic and social campaigner, producing novels, essays, plays and films. In 1989, she met the photographer Annie Leibovitz, with whom she had a close relationship for the rest of her life. ‘If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer,’ said Sontag when she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2001, ‘it is an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.’
Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)
Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag’s first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was among the first critics to write about the intersection between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, and to give them equal value as valid topics, shown here in her epoch-making pieces ‘Notes on Camp’ and ‘Against Interpretation’. Here too are impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis and contemporary religious thought.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 336 pages
[US] Picador | 336 pages
What’s new this week?
Several new classics were published this week, including the twelfth in the Fitzcarraldo Classics series and a new selection of short stories by Yukio Mishima, available in English for the first time.
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (1989)
In The Writing Life, Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard offers up her own trials in the pursuit of inspiration: the absurdity, the fierce determination and the sacrifices (warm feet; gainful employment; peace of mind). Her perennial guide, which wrestles with the hubris and insanity of the creative process, has been an inspiration and a comfort to writers for nearly forty years.
[UK] Canongate Canons | 128 pages
[US] Harper Perennial | 111 pages
Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories by Yukio Mishima (1960s)
A writer is seized by apocalyptic visions; a voyeuristic marquis commits a brutal act; and a trio of beatniks dance to modern jazz in the ruins of an abandoned church. Here, stark autobiography contrasts with pure horror, and the tenderness of first love cedes to obsession, heartbreak and deathly beauty. A new selection of Mishima’s short stories from the 1960s, Voices of the Fallen Heroes traces the final decade of Mishima’s career and offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of Japan’s greatest writers.
[UK] Penguin Modern Classics | 272 pages | translated by Stephen Dodd et al
[US] Vintage International | 272 pages | translated by Stephen Dodd et al
Representations of the Intellectual by Edward W. Said (1994)
Are intellectuals merely the servants of special interests or do they have a larger responsibility? In these wide-ranging essays, one of our most brilliant and fiercely independent public thinkers addresses this question with extraordinary eloquence. Said sees the intellectual as an exile and amateur whose role it is ‘to speak the truth to power’ even at the risk of ostracism or imprisonment. Drawing on the examples of Jonathan Swift and Theodor Adorno, Robert Oppenheimer and Henry Kissinger, Vietnam and the Gulf War, Said explores the implications of this idea and shows what happens when intellectuals succumb to the lures of money, power, or specialization.
[UK] Fitzcarraldo Classics #12 | 120 pages | preface by Isabella Hammad
[US] Vintage | 144 pages
Facing the Bridge by Yoko Tawada (1993, 1998, 2000)
Amo, an African kidnapped to Europe as a boy, and Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in Germany, live in different countries but are being followed by the same shadow; Kazuko, a young professional tourist, is lured to Vietnam by a mysterious postcard; on the Canary Islands, a nameless translator battles a banana grove and a series of Saint Georges . . . These three tales by master storyteller Yoko Tawada cross cultures and histories with a sensuous playfulness.
[UK] Granta Books | 192 pages | translated by Margaret Mitsutani
[US] New Directions | 192 pages | translated by Margaret Mitsutani
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Coming Attractions
For a sneak preview of our upcoming monthly read-alongs, you can take a peak here.
Over the course of 2026, we are reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: twelve volumes over twelve months, January to December.
Join us! We’re starting by discussing Book One: The Story of a Family (32 pages) next Friday 23 January, so there’s still time to catch up.
All our Brothers Karamazov posts will be gathered here – and here is the full reading schedule.
And a reminder that all the Brothers Karamazov posts and group discussions will be accessible to all subscribers for free! But if you would like to contribute to the conversation, you will need a paid subscription.
As ever, if you – or anyone you know – can’t afford a paid subscription, just let me know and I’ll send a gift subscription.
And if you’re enjoying our read-alongs, why not treat yourself to the Hatchards Classic Book Club annual book subscription?
You (or a friend) can receive all the books we read each month here on Read the Classics, beautifully gift-wrapped and delivered to your door, anywhere in the world, as well as a year’s complimentary subscription to Read the Classics, so you can choose to read along with us, if you wish.
To find out more, follow this link or email Hatchards directly: subscriptions@hatchards.co.uk
The Call of the Wild (1 of 2)
This week we’ve read the first half of The Call of the Wild by Jack London. Here are my thoughts:
