“The best English edition of the classic Chinese fantasy novel I have ever read.” ―Minjie Chen, Los Angeles Review of Books
A Penguin ClassicBefore there was
The Lord of the Rings, there was China’s
Monkey King. The title character, also known as Sun Wukong, is a shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, beloved by fans of the anime
Dragon Ball and the video games
League of Legends and
Black Myth: Wukong. For raiding Heaven’s Orchard of Immortal Peaches, the Buddha pins Monkey King beneath a mountain and frees him only five hundred years later, to protect the pious monk Tripitaka on a fourteen-year journey to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras. Accompanied by two other fallen immortals—a rice-loving pig able to fly with its ears and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster—Monkey King undergoes eighty-one trials, doing battle with all manner of dragons, ogres, wizards, and
femmes fatales in this rollicking adventure that not only stands as the most popular of China’s Four Great Classical Novels but also gave us one of world literature’s most memorable superheroes.
Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
One of the world's greatest fantasy novels, and a timeless classic of Chinese literature
One of China's Four Great Classical Novels, Monkey King was written anonymously during the Ming dynasty and is most commonly attributed to Wu Cheng'en, the son of a silk-shop clerk from east China. It recounts a Tang-dynasty monk's quest for Buddhist scriptures, accompanied by an omni-talented kung-fu Monkey King called Sun Wukong; a rice-loving divine pig; and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster.
Comparable to The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment.
