DON QUIJOTE DE LA MANCHA (VOL. 2)

Don Quijote used to lie awake at night trying to make sense of the language in his beloved books of chivalry. However, according to chapter 1 of Don Quijote, even Aristotle would not have been able to decipher the embellished passages of Don Quijote''s favorite works, and Don Quijote''s fate is widely known. Throughout the years, many American students of Spanish as a foreign language have probably thought to themselves, at least in jest, that they were also going mad while struggling through almost 1,000 pages of Cervantes''s prose, but there may be a remedy at last. “Finally!” exclaims Juan de la Cuesta''s promotional flyer for Tom Lathrop''s part 1 of Don Quijote, “An unabridged edition of the Quijote made for our students!” The target audience of this new edition is American students, and, accordingly, Lathrop has kept his readers'' language proficiency and cultural knowledge in mind while designing a more easily accessible version of Cervantes''s masterpiece. Lathrop''s Don Quijote, with modernized spelling when pronunciation is not affected, includes several features created to make the reading process more efficient, and the clearly written “Introduction to Students” explains how to make use of this volume. A glance at the top of almost every page reveals one of Lathrop''s contextualizing devices: Running headlines in English, which summarize a highlight from each page in a few words, can be useful for students before, during, and after the reading process. Students who skim the headlines before reading their daily assignments will have a general idea of the story to guide them through the episodes, and they should be able to follow Don Quijote''s plot more easily during the first reading by simply scanning the top of the page. In addition, students may refer to these headlines to review Don Quijote''s story line before examinations or to find quotes and passages more quickly if they are looking for a particular episode during class discussion. Another practical feature for class discussion is that the parts and chapters are numbered on the left-hand pages, and line numbers are found in the left margin of every page. Along with the headlines, this edition of Don Quijote, which is based on the four volume Schevill-Bonilla edition (1928-1941), provides readers with lexical,