An aging hidalgo from La Mancha loses himself so completely to chivalric romances that he reinvents himself as Don Quixote, a knight-errant on a quest to revive the dying art of chivalry. Mounting his bony horse Rocinante and accompanied by the earthy, pragmatic Sancho Panza, he rides forth to right wrongs, protect the innocent, and seek the favor of his imagined lady Dulcinea. The world he encounters, however, refuses to cooperate with his dreams. Windmills become giants, inns become castles, and every humiliation becomes proof of enchantment conspiring against him. What begins as uproarious satire gradually reveals its depths: Don Quixote is neither simply mad nor simply wise. He is a man who chooses fiction over reality, beauty over truth, and in doing so exposes the poverty of the world around him. Sancho, initially the voice of common sense, begins to dream alongside his master, and the two become bound in a friendship that literature has rarely matched. Nearly four centuries old, this novel invented the modern form and asks the question every reader must answer: is it better to see the world as it is, or as it might be?
