Gulliver's Travels (Warbler Classics Annotated Edition)

Description

“Among the six indispensable books in world literature.” —George Orwell Jonathan Swift skewered society, commerce, politics, and war in his greatest work, Gulliver’s Travels. The four-part tale opens with a shipwreck on the island of Lilliput, whose inhabitants are just six inches tall. One fierce controversy concerns which end of an egg to crack open. In part two, Gulliver’s ship ends up on Brobdingnag, an island of giants, where he is exhibited as a curiosity and partakes in cutting political tête-à-têtes with its king. In part three, Gulliver encounters Houyhnhnms, horses with the qualities of rational men. These he contrasts with the barbaric Yahoos, brutes in human shape. Finally, Gulliver returns from his travels with bitter insights into the nature of man and the barbarism that underlies so-called civilization. This Warbler Classics edition is based on the complete first edition of 1726, reproduces all of the original illustrations, and includes a biographical timeline of Swift’s enigmatic life. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was an Anglo-Irish author, political pamphleteer, poet, and Anglican cleric. He is widely considered to be the greatest prose satirist in the English language. “One of the best and most important books in the world.” —The Globe and Mail “A masterpiece of sustained and savage indignation.” —The Guardian “A masterwork of irony…that contains both a dark and bitter meaning and a joyous, extraordinary creativity of imagination.” —Malcolm Bradbury “Furious, raging, obscene.” —William Thackeray “The more I read your works, the more I am ashamed of mine.” —Voltaire in a letter to Swift (1728) Review: Misleading description - This edition is not annotated! Review: Great book. A classic worth revisiting. - Reading Gulliver's Travels has made me laugh like no other book for a long time. It is so much more than just a fantastical tale of a man journeying to mystical lands. Written in the old style where listing off occurrences constituted an adventure and a perfectly well constructed story, Gulliver's Travels can be at times a tedious read. It's filled with a laundry list of actions ("I did this and then I did this"), and when you think some tension or conflict is a brewin' you get simple expedients flatly stated ("I was faced with an obstacle and so I overcame it by doing this.") After a time it all becomes trying and uninspiring, making the turning of pages ever more difficult.