Monkey King: Journey to the West

Author

Wu Cheng'en

Original Work

Journey to the West

Translator

Julia Lovell

Editor

Julia Lovell

Foreword / Afterword

Julia Lovell, Gene Luen Yang

Language

English

Year

2025

Publisher

Penguin

Country

United Kingdom

Pages

384

ISBN

0143138936

0001

“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.— Google Books