Customer Reviews

Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings (New Riverside Editions)

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This comment refers to the Bantam Classics Paperback version. And is just a small criticism.

This very affordable little paperback is a jam packed with most of Swifts writings, but if you start to venture beyond Gulliver's Travels and his lighter proposals you will find yourself quickly wishing for a little more in the way of footnotes or endnotes.

I picked this book up to read A Tale of the Tub for the first time. It is wonderful piece of writing, and many scholars call it Swift's best. However, even the introduction to the Bantam edition points out that we have to sometimes rely on scholarship to fill in many of the allusions in the text that have been lost to time.

I enjoyed reading it, but found myself many times wondering what Swift's target or motivation was for writing certain passages. This edition won't help you out.

I wish to reread Tale of a Tub, but I will probably pick up a better annotated version.

Any suggestions for a well-annotated version. The Oxford Classics or maybe the Norton?

No wonder they make students read this everywhere. Funny and profound, it still works every bit as much, if not more so, today than when he wrote it. If for no other reason, read it because genius is just fun to watch in action.