"It's a triumph. Kincaid, at the start, writes that she herself is a 'Friday in all but name, ' giving the main character, his creator, and the empire that birthed them what-for; the Mexican artist Eko contributes gorgeous and striking illustrations throughout the text. This is a wonderfully published book, right down to the 'blurbs, ' which come waltzing through history from Ms. Woolf, Mr. Coetzee, Mr. Fuentes, Mr. Dickens, and Mr. Samuel Johnson, who rightly asks, 'Was there ever anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers?'"

"Like Odysseus embarked for Ithaca, like Quixote mounted on Rocinante, Robinson Crusoe with his parrot and umbrella has become a figure in the collective consciousness of the West, transcending the book which--in its multitude of editions, translations, imitations, and adaptations ("Robinsonades")--celebrates his adventures. Having pretended once to belong to history, he finds himself in the sphere of myth."

--J.M. Coetzee

"The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe who, shipwrecked on a lonely island, with a knife and a pipe in his pocket, becomes an architect, carpenter, knife-grinder, astronomer, and cleric. He is the true prototype of the British colonist just as Friday (the faithful savage who arrives one ill-starred day) is the symbol of the subject race. All the Anglo-Saxon soul is in Crusoe; virile independence, unthinking cruelty, persistence, slow yet effective intelligence, sexual apathy, practical and well-balanced religiosity, calculating dourness."

--James Joyce

"Was there every anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim's Progress?"

--Samuel Johnson

"Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology and, if need be, racism and imperialism."

--Carlos Fuentes

"[Robinson Crusoe] is a masterpiece, and it is a masterpiece largely because Defoe has throughout kept consistently to his own sense of perspective... The mere suggestion--peril and solitude and a desert island--is enough to rouse in us the expectation of some far land on the limits of the world; of the sun rising and the sun setting; of man, isolated from his kind, brooding alone upon the nature of society and the strange ways of men."

--Virginia Woolf

"I thought it that Robinson Crusoe should be the only instance of a universally popular book that could make no one laugh and could make no one cry . . . I will venture to say that there is not in literature a more surprising instance of utter want of tenderness and sentiment, than the death of Friday."

--Charles Dickens