Will I love The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha?

My favorite novel, and I think one of the greatest leaps of imagination in literature.

It is not technically a portal story because Don Quixote does not travel to another world. Instead, he travels through another world created by his imagination. The brilliance is in the balancing act of spinning adventure after adventure while continuing to extend the meta-narrative, stories within stories.

In part two, Don Quixote reads and comments on Cervantes's rendering of his adventures in part one. On top of this, the author layers in social and literary commentary and humor. Despite being written over four hundred years… show more.

The 400+ year-old urtext of metafiction, Cervantes’ masterpiece is directly responsible for my own novel. But its influence on literature is incalculable. The story of a man driven mad by the spellbinding power of romantic books about knights and the women they serve, Don Quixote is more than just a comedy. While serving up one misadventure after another, Cervantes pokes fun at books about chivalry, poetry, authorial ego, and the very process of writing a book. Subjects that still consume us today, from book burning to censorship to plagiarism, also get their time in the spotlight. One note of… show more.