Before there was The Lord of the Rings, there was China's Monkey
King, one of the all-time great fantasy novels--which Neil Gaiman has
said "is in the DNA of 1.5 billion people"--now published in a thrilling
new one-volume translation with an illustrated foreword by Gene Luen
Yang
A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper
A shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, Sun
Wukong, or Monkey King, is one of the most memorable superheroes in
world literature, known to legions of fans of the most popular anime of
all time, Dragon Ball, and the world's largest e-sport, the video game
League of Legends. High-spirited and omni-talented, he amasses
dazzling weapons and skills on his journey to immortality: a gold-hooped
staff that can grow as tall as the sky and shrink to the size of a
needle; the ability to travel 108,000 miles in a single somersault. A
master of subterfuge, he can transform himself into whomever or whatever
he chooses and turn each of his body's 84,000 hairs into an army of
clones. But his penchant for mischief repeatedly gets him into trouble,
and when he raids Heaven's Orchard of Immortal Peaches and gorges
himself on the elixirs of the gods, the Buddha pins him beneath a
mountain, freeing him only five hundred years later for a chance to
redeem himself: He is to protect the pious monk Tripitaka on his
fourteen-year journey to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras
that will bring enlightenment to the Chinese empire.
Joined by two other fallen immortals--Pigsy, a rice-loving pig able to
fly with its ears, and Sandy, a depressive man-eating river-sand
monster--Monkey King undergoes eighty-one trials, doing battle with Red
Boy, Princess Jade-Face, the Monstress Dowager, and all manner of
dragons, ogres, wizards, and femmes fatales, navigating the perils of
Fire-Cloud Cave, the River of Flowing Sand, the Water-Crystal Palace,
and Casserole Mountain, and being serially captured, lacquered, sautéed,
steamed, and liquefied, but always hatching an ingenious plan to get
himself and his fellow pilgrims out of their latest jam.
Monkey King: Journey to the West is at once a rollicking adventure, a
comic satire of Chinese bureaucracy, and a spring of spiritual insight.
With this new translation, the irrepressible rogue hero of one of the
Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature has the potential to
vault, with his signature cloud-somersault and unerring sense for fun,
into the hearts of millions of Americans.
