Before there was The Lord of the Rings, there was China's Monkey King. The title character, also known as Sun Wukong, is a shape-shifting trickster on a kung-fu quest for eternal life, and is beloved by fans of the most popular anime of all time, Dragon Ball, and the world's largest e-sport, the video game League of Legends.

For raiding Heaven's Orchard of Immortal Peaches, the Buddha pins him beneath a mountain and frees him only five hundred years later. To redeem himself, our irrepressible rogue hero has to protect the pious monk Tripitaka on his fourteen-year journey to India in search of precious Buddhist sutras.

Accompanied by two other fallen immortals--Pigsy, a rice-loving pig able to fly with its ears, and Sandy, a depressive man-eating river-sand monster--Monkey King undergoes eighty-one trials, doing battle with all manner of dragons, ogres, wizards, and femmes fatales in this rollicking adventure that not only stands as the most popular of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature but also gave us one of the most memorable superheroes in world literature.