`Who has not Tristram Shandy read? Is any mortal so ill bred?` So wrote the young James Boswell in the spring of 1760, when Sterne`s comic novel was received with extravagant popular acclaim and some bewilderment. Indeed, how can one describe a novel whose hero-narrator fails in the first two volumes even to get himself born? A narrator who, in a series of digressions he calls the `sunshine` of reading, interests us instead in such characters as his uncle Toby, a devotee of wargames in the garden, or Parson Yorick, a self-portrait of the author? The text of this Oxford World`s Classics edition is based on the first editions of all nine volumes. No unnecessary modernization has obscured Sterne`s idiosyncratic presentation of the novel.