GULLIVER’S TRAVELS: An Illuminated Edition: 14

An oversized, slipcased art-book edition of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS — Jonathan Swift's fantastical travelogue and savage satire of human folly and imperialist pretension — newly illustrated by the celebrated Italian artist Lorenzo Mattotti, with original essays from author and comedian Patton Oswalt and scholar Elizabeth Bellamy. A surgeon turned castaway, Lemuel Gulliver sails into the absurd and the sublime. Shipwrecked among the six-inch citizens of Lilliput, he watches an empire wage war over which end of an egg to crack. Cowering beneath the Brobdingnagians, he becomes a curiosity, his proud account of England met with disgust. He debates the useless philosophers of the airborne island of Laputa, then recoils from the brutish Yahoos who share a country with the Houyhnhnms — horses more rational than men. Each voyage peels back the illusion of civilization, exposing the hypocrisy, pride, and foolishness in human nature and the constructions of society. What looks like an adventure tale is an x-ray of the pomposity of enlightenment European culture, and of humankind itself. Mattotti renders Gulliver's journey across more than sixty-five illustrations animated by wonder and strangeness — Lilliput and Brobdingnag rendered not as curiosities but as genuinely disorienting places, beautiful and unmoored. A new entry in Beehive Books' Illuminated Editions series, this volume is printed on uncoated acid-free paper in an oversized 9×12″ trim and housed in a die-cut, sculpturally embossed slipcase.