The Little Prince

by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Gorgeous and at times devastating, this picture book tells the story of knowledge, exploration and the cross-section of loneliness and humanity. It’s the tale of one little boy and his journey through space, and it packs all the feels.

Since 1943, the wise little boy from Asteroid B-612 has led children and their adults to deeper understandings of love, friendship, and responsibility. The Little Prince is a cherished story, read by millions of people in more than a hundred languages. In honor of its sixtieth anniversary, Harcourt is proud to present this special edition of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's treasure, which includes a satin bookmark and presentation page, and comes in an elegant cloth slipcase enhanced with gold stamping and embossing. A must-have edition for any collector, this lovely book is also the perfect gift for those new to the wisdom of the Little Prince and the charms of his rose-and-star-filled worlds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789364280761
Publisher:	Double 9 Books
Publication date:	11/27/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), born in Lyons, France, is one of the world’s best loved and widest read writers. His timeless fable, The Little Prince, has sold more than 100 million copies and has been translated into nearly every language. His pilot’s memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, won the National Book Award and was named the #1 adventure book of all time by Outside magazine and was ranked #3 on National Geographic Adventure’s list of all-time-best exploration books. His other books include Night Flight; Southern Mail; and Airman's Odyssey. A pilot at twenty-six, he was a pioneer of commercial aviation and flew in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1944, while flying a reconnaissance mission for his French air squadron, he disappeared over the Mediterranean. 

Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of several bestselling biographies and historical works including, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), born in Lyons, France, is one of the world’s best loved and widest read writers. His timeless fable, The Little Prince, has sold more than 100 million copies and has been translated into nearly every language. His pilot’s memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, won the National Book Award and was named the #1 adventure book of all time by Outside magazine and was ranked #3 on National Geographic Adventure’s list of all-time-best exploration books. His other books include Night Flight; Southern Mail; and Airman's Odyssey. A pilot at twenty-six, he was a pioneer of commercial aviation and flew in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. In 1944, while flying a reconnaissance mission for his French air squadron, he disappeared over the Mediterranean. 

Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of several bestselling biographies and historical works including, most recently, The Witches: Salem, 1692. In 2018 she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2019. Schiff has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other publications. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

I
 
Once when I was six I saw a magnificent picture in a book about the jungle, called True Stories. It showed a boa constrictor swallowing a wild beast. Here is a copy of the picture.
 
In the book it said: “Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing. Afterwards they are no longer able to move, and they sleep during the six months of their digestion.”
 
In those days I thought a lot about jungle adventures, and eventually managed to make my first drawing, using a coloured pencil. My drawing Number One looked like this:
 
[illustration]
 
I showed the grown-ups my masterpiece, and I asked them if my drawing scared them.
 
They answered, “Why be scared of a hat?”
 
My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. Then I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so the grown-ups could understand. They always need explanations. My drawing Number Two looked like this:
 
[illustration]
 
The grown-ups advised me to put away my drawings of boa constrictors, outside or inside, and apply myself instead to geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar.
 
That is why I abandoned, at the age of six, a magnificent career as an artist. I had been discouraged by the failure of my drawing Number One and of my drawing Number Two. Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for children to have to provide explanations over and over again.
 
So then I had to choose another career, and I learned to pilot aeroplanes. I have flown almost everywhere in the world. And, as a matter of fact, geography has been a big help to me. I could tell China from Arizona at first glance, which is very useful if you get lost during the night.
 
So I have had, in the course of my life, lots of encounters with lots of serious people. I have spent lots of time with grown-ups. I have seen them at close range … which hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.
 
Whenever I encountered a grown-up who seemed to me at all enlightened, I would experiment on him with my drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I wanted to see if he really understood anything. But he would always answer, “That’s a hat.” Then I  wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.

II
 
So I lived all alone, without anyone I could really talk to, until I had to make a crash landing in the Sahara Desert six years ago. Something in my plane’s engine had broken, and since I had neither a mechanic nor passengers in the plane with me, I was preparing to undertake the difficult repair job by myself. For me it was a matter of life or death: I had only enough  drinking water for eight days.
 
The first night, then, I went to sleep on the sand a thousand miles from any inhabited country. I was more isolated than a man shipwrecked on a raft in the middle of the ocean. So you can imagine my surprise when I was awakened at daybreak by a funny little voice saying, “Please … draw me a sheep …”
 
“What?”
 
“Draw me a sheep …”
 
I leaped up as if I had been struck by lightning. I rubbed my eyes hard. I stared. And I saw an extraordinary little fellow staring back at me very seriously. Here is the best portrait I managed to make of him, later on. But of course my drawing is much less attractive than my model. This is not my fault. My career as a painter was discouraged at the age of six by the grown-ups, and I had never learned to draw anything except boa constrictors, outside and inside.
 
So I stared wide-eyed at this apparition. Don’t forget that I was a thousand miles from any inhabited territory. Yet this little fellow seemed to be neither lost nor dying of exhaustion, hunger, or thirst; nor did he seem scared to death. There was nothing in his appearance that suggested a child lost in the middle of the desert a thousand miles from any inhabited territory. When I finally managed to speak, I asked him, “But … what are you doing here?”
 
And then he repeated, very slowly and very seriously,“Please … draw me a sheep …”
 
In the face of an overpowering mystery, you don’t dare disobey. Absurd as it seemed, a thousand miles from all inhabited regions and in danger of death, I took a scrap of paper and a pen out of my pocket. But then I remembered that I had mostly studied geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar, and I told the little fellow (rather crossly) that I didn’t know how to draw.
 
He replied, “That doesn’t matter. Draw me a sheep.”
 
Since I had never drawn a sheep, I made him one of the only two drawings I knew how to make—the one of the boa constrictor from outside. And I was astounded to hear the little fellow answer:
“No! No! I don’t want an elephant inside a boa constrictor. A boa constrictor is very dangerous, and an elephant would get in the way. Where I live, everything is very small. I need a sheep. Draw me a sheep.”
 
So then I made a drawing. He looked at it carefully, and then said, “No. This one is already quite sick. Make another.”
 
I made another drawing. My friend gave me a kind, indulgent smile: “You can see for yourself … that’s not a sheep, it’s a ram. It has horns …”
 
So I made my third drawing, but it was rejected, like the others: “This one’s too old. I want a sheep that will live a long time.”
 
So then, impatiently, since I was in a hurry to start work on my engine, I scribbled this drawing, and added, “This is just the crate. The sheep you want is inside.”
 
But I was amazed to see my young critic’s face light up. “That’s just the kind I wanted! Do you think this sheep will need a lot of grass?”
 
“Why?”
 
“Because where I live, everything is very small …”
 
“There’s sure to be enough. I’ve given you a very small sheep.”
 
He bent over the drawing. “Not so small as all that … Look! He’s gone to sleep …”
 
And that’s how I made the acquaintance of the little prince.

Editorial Reviews

Fans of that stellar Little Prince can celebrate his 60th anniversary with a stunning gift edition! A must-have for any collector, this edition comes with a satin ribbon bookmark and presentation page, all enclosed in a cloth slipcase with gold stamping. The starry prince has delighted readers for six decades, but he's never looked better.

bn.com

Richard Gere is the principle narrator in this superbly produced CD format version of Antoine de SaintEXupery's classic children's story The Little Prince. This fifty minute production is a technically flawless audio version of a pilot stranded in the desert and wakening one morning to see before him a little fellow who captures the hearts and imaginations of all who read (and now hear) this remarkable modern fable. Haley Joel Osment gives voice to the Little Prince, while Marina Orsini, Adam Frost, Richard Allen, Dave Walsh, Ara Y. Kentenjian, Patrick Selitz, and Mickey Kessler lend their talents to this multicast production, with music by AleXxandre Stankevicius. The Little Prince is highly entertaining, enthusiastically recommended, and a "must" for school and community library audiobook CD collections.

"[E]yes are blind. You have to look with the heart," says the little prince, which makes this pop-up edition of the 1943 classic a bit of an odd duck. De Saint-Exupery's minimalist illustrations become full-color paper-engineered elements in a blown-up, two-inch-thick unabridged edition. Flaps lift, figures pop, tableaux emerge in ingenious fashion, creating a reading experience as surreal as the story. But the tension between text and image inherent in any illustrated book is exacerbated to the nth degree here, as the beguiling doodads beckon readers to race through the pages, leaving the story they're meant to illustrate behind. The contemplative fable is turned into a mere excuse for paper whimsy, the fun of making the prince turn to meet the fox overriding the wonder of the interaction. Too cool for its own good. (Pop-up/fiction. 10 & up)

Kirkus Reviews

 The Little Prince
 
"A lovely story...which covers a poetic, yearning philosophy—not the sort of fable that can be tacked down neatly at its four corners but rather reflections on what are real matters of consequence." —The New York Times Book Review
 

"Saint-Exupéry's most famous work -- a gentle fable of love and peace -- contains a thoughtful assessment of the details of its composition...[T]he special allure of the work is still the naively sophisticated, heartwarming tale of the little prince and his small planet." —Horn Book
 
“This new translation into 'modern' English brings a classic tale into sharper focus for today's teens without sacrificing the beauty and simplicity of the author's writing, and the 'restored' artwork has all the charm of the original drawings. What appears to be a simple tale of two lost souls-one, a pilot marooned in the desert next to his ditched plane; the other, a minuscule prince in self-imposed exile from an asteroid so small that he can watch the sunset 44 times a day-reveals itself as something far more complex. What appears to be a fairy tale for children opens like the petals of the Little Prince's flower into a fantasy that has lessons for all of us.” —School Library Journal
 
“Always welcome is that charming visitor from another planet, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince...The fable remains as lyrically haunting as ever.” —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher