DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

What Do I Know?

Essential Essays

Michel de Montaigne author David Coward translator Yiyun Li editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Pushkin Press

Published:5th Oct '23

Should be back in stock very soon

What Do I Know? cover

A selection of Michel de Montaigne's most profound, searching essays, in a new translation and stunning hardback edition featuring an introduction by Yiyun Li 'I myself am the subject of my book'. So wrote Montaigne in the introductory note to his Essays, the book that marked the birth of the modern essay form. In works of probing intelligence and idiosyncratic observation, Montaigne moved from intimate personal reflection to roving theories of the conduct of kings and cannibals, the effects of sorrow and fear, and the fallibility of human memory and judgement. This new selection of Montaigne's most ingenious essays appears in a lucid new translation by the prize-winning David Coward. What Do I Know? offers the modern reader profound insight into a great Renaissance mind.

'Read Montaigne in order to live' - Gustave Flaubert

'I defy any reader of Montaigne not to put down the book at some point and say with incredulity: How did he know all that about me?' - The Times

'[Montaigne] was the first who had the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man' - William Hazlitt

ISBN: 9781782278818

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

192 pages