• Edited by a leading Melville scholar, past president of the Herman Melville Society, and a participant in the 38th Voyage of the Charles W. Morgan, the world's last surviving wooden whaleship and the sister ship to the Acushnet, in which Melville sailed
• Introduction highlights a little-known annotation in Hawthorne's copy of Moby-Dick
• An edition for the twenty-first century, one that recognizes that each generation of readers will remake classic novels anew
• Introduces readers to the experience of reading the book, interpretative questions, and its place in the history of the American novel

New to this Edition:

• Updated explanatory notes reflect the increased access to information that contemporary readers have
• New introduction focuses on the novel's elasticity and continued relevance for twenty-first-century readers, with attention to its queerness and its meditations on race, power, and disability

    
"It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy.... Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this."
     
Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation. Less well known are the novel's unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, messy, and wondrous moments. Narrator Ishmael, along with the whaleship Pequod's other "meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways", is beguiled into joining Captain Ahab in his vengeful pursuit of the white whale that "dismasted" him. But along the way, Ishmael takes the reader along many a detour into variegated ways of knowing. In a tone "strangely compounded of fun and fury", Moby-Dick brings outlandish curiosity to bear on the multitudinous, oceanic scale of our diverse world.