Monkey King

“The best English edition of the classic Chinese fantasy novel I have ever read.” ―Minjie Chen, Los Angeles Review of Books A Penguin Classic Before 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.

Very little is known about Wu Cheng'en (c. 1505-80), although he is believed to have held the post of District Magistrate for a time. He had a reputation as a good poet, but only a few rather commonplace verses of his survive in an anthology of Ming poetry and in a local gazetteer.