Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Hailed by Dostoyevsky as "The final and greatest utterance of the human mind," Don Quixote constitutes a founding work of modern Western literature.

Cervantes' masterpiece has been translated into more than sixty languages, and the novel's fantasy-driven "knight," Don Quixote, and his loyal squire, Sancho Panza, rank among fiction's most recognized characters. Their adventures have been interpreted for film, opera, and ballet, and they head a cast of characters that comprises a diverse array of beliefs and perspectives, reflecting the historical realities of seventeenth-century Spain.

Within its absorbing re-creation of the world during Cervantes' time, this parody of chivalric romances and epic of heroic idealism forms a strikingly contemporary narrative.