Monkey King: Journey to the West (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) - Paperback

by Wu Cheng'en (Author), Julia Lovell (Editor), Julia Lovell (Translator)

*Soon to be a Netflix animated movie featuring Stephanie Hsu, Bowen Yang, and BD Wong among the all-Asian voice cast*

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 the author of the New York Times bestselling graphic novel that is the basis for the Disney+ series American Born Chinese, starring Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Stephanie Hsu, as well as Daniel Wu as the Monkey King

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.

Author Biography

Wu Cheng'en (c. 1505-1580) was a Ming Dynasty poet about whom little is known, although he is believed to be the author of Journey to the West, which he published anonymously. He lived much of his life as a hermit.
Julia Lovell (editor/translator/introducer) is the translator of The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun and the author of Maoism and The Opium War. She is a professor of modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes about China for The Guardian, Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Gene Luen Yang (foreword) is a MacArthur "genius," the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, and the author of the half-million-copy New York Times bestselling graphic novel and National Book Award finalist American Born Chinese.