Monkey King

A Chinese Lord of the Rings and one of the great fantasy novels of all time--which Neil Gaiman has said is in the DNA of 1.5 billion people--now in a thrilling new one-volume translationA Penguin Classics HardcoverThe world's most popular superhero, Monkey King is a shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life. High-spirited and omni-talented, he amasses dazzling weapons on his heavenward climb, including a gold-hooped staff that can grow as tall as the sky and shrink to the size of a needle, and the ability to travel 108,000 miles in a single leap and to turn each of his body's 84,000 hairs into an army of clones and other animals, making him a master of subterfuge. But his penchant for mischief repeatedly gets him into trouble, and when he raids the 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 sixteen-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 the Mountain of Hidden Mists, the River of Flowing Sand, the Water-Crystal Palace, and the Cliff of Mysterious Demons, and being serially captured, lacquered, sautéed, steamed, and impregnated, 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 and beloved 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.