The Snow Leopard - (Penguin Classics) by Peter Matthiessen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

About the Author

Peter Matthiessen was the cofounder of The Paris Review and is the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Indian Country, and The Snow Leopard, winner of the National Book Award.