Best Seller

The Snow Leopard

Name: The Snow Leopard
Price: 18.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Peter Matthiessen
ISBN: 9780143105510

Paperback $18.00

Published on Sep 30, 2008 | 368 Pages

Buy from Other Retailers:

$18.00

Published on Sep 30, 2008 | 368 Pages

Buy from Other Retailers:

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

“A masterpiece that exceeds the boundaries of the travel genre and envelops you with its incredible prose.” —Wall Street Journal

An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014)

In 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Zen Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by acclaimed travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

“My favorite record of an animal voyage is a book that’s fluent in failure, Peter Matthiessen’s nonfiction masterpiece The Snow Leopard . . . the great perfect shock of The Snow Leopard is that Matthiessen never actually sees a snow leopard . . . that failure becomes a powerful lesson in loss, a chance to meditate on the tangled nature of visibility and invisibility.” —Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine

“A masterpiece that exceeds the boundaries of the travel genre and envelops you with its incredible prose.” —Wall Street Journal

“Stunning . . . Fiercely felt and magnificently written . . . [Matthiessen] has expressed with uncommon candor and no prospect of relief, a longing which keeps the soul striving and alert in us all.” —Washington Post

“A magical book, a kind of lunar paradigm and map of the sacred.” —The Nation

“A beautiful, magnificent book that gives off at once the resonance of a classic . . . One of the most wonderful accountsI know of journeying in our time.” —W. S. Merwin

Author

Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927 and had already begun his writing career by the time he graduated from Yale University in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of The Paris Review. Besides At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for the National Book Award, he published six other works of fiction, including Far Tortuga and Killing Mister Watson. Matthiessen’s parallel career as a naturalist and explorer resulted in numerous widely acclaimed books of nonfiction, among them The Tree Where Man Was Born, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and The Snow Leopard, which won it. Matthiessen died in 2014.

Learn More

The Snow Leopard

Related Genres

You May Also Like

Mutual Aid

Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag

The Conference of the Birds

Either/Or

Au Bonheur des Dames

Siddhartha

The Need for Roots

Hallucinations

The Sagas of Icelanders

The Decameron

Success!

Part of Penguin Audio Classics

By Peter MatthiessenIntroduction by Pico Iyer