The Penguin English Library Edition of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville'The frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain...'Moby-Dick is one of the most expansive feats of imagination in the whole of literature: the mad, raging, Shakespearean tale of Captain Ahab's insane quest to kill a giant white whale that has taken his leg, and upon which he has sworn vengeance, at any cost. A creation unlike any other, this is an epic story of fatal monomania and the deepest dreams and obsessions of mankind. The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

The Penguin English Library
9780141198958
Herman Melville

WHY WOULD YOU REED MOBY DICK?
Looking for a new book to obsess over? Call me the next classic you will read.
Dive into Melville’s Moby Dick for a read that is as tumultuous as the sea it describes. Following Ishmael and the crew of the Pequod, the novel describes the hunt of The Whale, Captain Ahab’s nemesis, the object of his relentless pursuit. Beyond serving as an encyclopaedia on whales and the whaling profession, the novel offers psychological, and often theological, insight into madness, trauma and obsession. Showing the fight between man and nature, and perhaps more importantly, the fight of man against himself, Moby Dick lasts as an exploration of obsession and the struggle to impose purpose on the vast, impersonal forces of the sea.