Don Quixote

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Alonso Quixano is a minor country gentleman of La Mancha who has read so many romances of chivalry that his brain dries up, and he decides the sensible response is to become a knight-errant himself. He renames himself Don Quixote, dresses an old suit of armor, chooses a bony farm horse as his steed and names it Rocinante, and sets out to right wrongs, rescue the oppressed, and win glory for a lady, Dulcinea del Toboso, who exists mainly in his own head. He soon recruits a practical, none-too-bright farmer named Sancho Panza as his squire, promising him an island to govern in exchange for his loyalty.

What follows is a string of encounters in which Don Quixote's chivalric imagination collides with an unglamorous Spanish countryside of innkeepers, muleteers, barbers, and windmills — and loses, repeatedly and painfully, without ever once admitting defeat. Sancho, half convinced and half exasperated, trails after him supplying the common sense his master refuses to use, and the two of them argue their way across Spain in one of literature's first and best double acts.

Published in 1605, Don Quixote is widely credited as the first modern novel, the book that made irony and self-awareness part of what fiction could do. Its comedy has never dated because it is built on something that never does: the gap between the story we tell about ourselves and the world's flat refusal to play along. This new translation keeps Cervantes's mock-heroic voice and the warmth underneath its mockery.