Bailey Cove Classics: The Golden Ass

(This title may also be freely downloaded as an ebook from HMCPL's Digital Media Zone Public Domain Collection, search term: Apuleius.)

Apuleius's Golden Ass is a unique, entertaining, and thoroughly readable Latin novel—the only work of fiction in Latin to have survived from antiquity. It tells the story of the hero Lucius, whose curiosity and fascination for sex and magic results in his transformation into an ass. After suffering a series of trials and humiliations, he is ultimately returned to human shape by the kindness of the goddess Isis. Simultaneously a blend of romantic adventure, fable, and religious testament, The Golden Ass is one of the truly seminal works of European literature, of intrinsic interest as a novel in its own right, and one of the earliest examples of the picaresque. This new translation is at once faithful to the meaning of the Latin, while reproducing all the exuberance of the original.