Every work,
annotated.
You get the whole passage, in its own words, plus a note in the margin that explains what it's doing. Nothing is abridged.
See which of these became films →Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1818
A broken statue, a desert, and the longest-lasting boast in English.
The Tyger
William Blake · 1794
Six burning questions about who could possibly build something so fierce.
Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
William Shakespeare · 1609
The love poem that quietly promises to outlive every summer.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth · 1807
Ten thousand daffodils, and the memory that keeps on paying out.
Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll · 1871
A poem made almost entirely of invented words — and you still follow it.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost · 1916
The poem everyone quotes as wisdom, and misreads as advice.
To be, or not to be
William Shakespeare · Hamlet · 1601
The most famous think-out-loud in the language, plainly translated.
Pride and Prejudice — Opening
Jane Austen · 1813
One ironic sentence that dismantles an entire marriage market.
A Tale of Two Cities — Opening
Charles Dickens · 1859
The most famous opening sentence in fiction, and what it's actually doing.
The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln · 1863
272 words that quietly rewrote what a country is for.
Beowulf
Anonymous · c. 700–1000
Where English literature starts: a hall, a monster, and a poem built on alliteration.
The Canterbury Tales — General Prologue
Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1387
Thirty pilgrims, one storytelling contest, and a poet pretending to be naive.
Macbeth — The Dagger Soliloquy
William Shakespeare · 1606
A man argues with a dagger he knows perfectly well isn't there.
Doctor Faustus — The Bargain
Christopher Marlowe · c. 1592
The bargain with the devil that English drama never got over.
No Man Is an Island
John Donne · 1624
The sentence that gave Hemingway a title and everyone else a funeral reading.
Paradise Lost — The Invocation
John Milton · 1667
The epic in which the villain quietly gets the best lines.
The Pilgrim's Progress — The Dream
John Bunyan · 1678
A dream in plain prose that half of England once knew by heart.
An Essay on Man
Alexander Pope · 1733
Eighteenth-century philosophy in couplets that close like lids.
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1816
A poem Coleridge claimed he dreamed, and then lost.
She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron · 1815
The most carefully balanced compliment ever paid in English verse.
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats · 1819
Keats tries to leave his own body, and nearly manages it.
Frankenstein — The Creature Speaks
Mary Shelley · 1818
A novel about creation, written by a teenager on a wet holiday.
Jane Eyre — Opening
Charlotte Brontë · 1847
A plain, poor governess who says exactly what she thinks.
Great Expectations — Opening
Charles Dickens · 1861
A marsh, a small boy, and the most atmospheric opening in English fiction.
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe · 1845
The poem engineered, beat by beat, to get inside your head.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats · 1919
Twenty-two lines that every crisis since 1919 has been quoted into.
The Waste Land — Opening
T. S. Eliot · 1922
The poem that broke English verse open, starting with a contradiction.
Mrs Dalloway — Opening
Virginia Woolf · 1925
One June day in London, told from inside a mind.
Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
William Shakespeare · 1609
The anti-love poem that ends up the most honest love poem in English.
Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
William Shakespeare · 1609
Love defined by what it survives, not by what it feels.
All the world's a stage
William Shakespeare · As You Like It · 1599
Seven ages of man, from the play's most cheerfully depressed courtier.
Death, be not proud
John Donne · 1633
A sonnet that argues with death and wins on a technicality.
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell · 1681
A seduction argument built like a syllogism, with a graveyard in the middle.
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift · 1729
The most savage joke in English, delivered in the calmest voice.
The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope · 1712
An epic about a stolen curl of hair, which is the entire point.
London
William Blake · 1794
A city where every institution is a lock, and every face is a record of it.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
William Wordsworth · 1802
London at dawn, seen as though nobody had ever looked at it before.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
William Wordsworth · 1798
Returning to a place to find that the person who first saw it has gone.
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1820
A poet asking the weather to use him as an instrument.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats · 1819
A ballad with one question, one answer, and no cure.
A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns · 1794
The simplest promise in English poetry, and the longest one.
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold · 1867
A honeymoon poem that ends on a battlefield.
Ulysses
Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1842
An old hero refusing the only thing left to him: rest.
My Last Duchess
Robert Browning · 1842
A monologue in which the speaker condemns himself while being perfectly polite.
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850
A love sonnet that measures itself against everything, including death.
Moby-Dick — Opening
Herman Melville · 1851
Three words that turn a narrator into an invitation.
Huckleberry Finn — Opening
Mark Twain · 1884
A boy explaining himself in a grammar that is the whole novel.
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson · c. 1863
Death as a courteous driver, and eternity as a roof.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen · 1917
The Latin tag that patriotic poetry loved, taken apart in a gas attack.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot · 1915
A middle-aged man rehearsing a question he will never ask.
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams · 1923
Sixteen words that ask what a poem is allowed to be about.
The Great Gatsby — Closing
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925
The last page of the American dream, written in the tense it describes.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847
Two houses, one moor, and a love that refuses to stay buried.
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871
A whole town, and every private ambition quietly measured against what it costs.
Dracula
Bram Stoker · 1897
Letters, diaries and telegrams closing in on one undead count.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 1890
A portrait ages so that its subject does not.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · 1844
A man returns from prison with a fortune and a list.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
Three brothers, one murdered father, and the question of whether anything is permitted.
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866
A student commits a murder to prove a theory, then has to live inside it.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
Five families, one invasion, and history refusing to be anyone's plan.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1878
One affair, one marriage, and a society that grants forgiveness unevenly.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
A country girl destroyed by other people's definitions of purity.
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1848
A fair with no heroes, and one woman determined to win at it.
Emma
Jane Austen · 1815
A clever woman with nothing to do decides to arrange other people's lives.
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen · 1811
Two sisters: one feels everything, one shows nothing, both must survive on very little.
Persuasion
Jane Austen · 1817
The second chance, eight years late.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott · 1868
Four sisters growing up while the money runs out.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy · 1874
A woman inherits a farm and three very different kinds of love.
Villette
Charlotte Brontë · 1853
A plain, brilliant, furious woman makes a life on her own terms.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892
Twelve cases, one method: observe, then reason backwards.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850
A letter of shame becomes the only honest thing in the town.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · 1876
A boy, a fence, a treasure, and a town that can be fooled.
King Lear
William Shakespeare · 1606
A king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to flatter him.
Othello
William Shakespeare · 1603
One rumour, repeated by a friend, destroys a marriage.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · 1595
Four lovers, six actors, one forest, and a very petty fairy king.
The Tempest
William Shakespeare · 1611
A magician on an island stages a shipwreck for his enemies.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
William Shakespeare · 1608
A prince loses everything at sea and spends a lifetime getting it back.
The Odyssey
Homer · c. 700 BC
A ten-year journey home, told mostly in flashback by a man who is very good at lying.
The Iliad
Homer · c. 750 BC
The last weeks of a siege, and the rage of one man inside it.
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1321
A guided tour of the afterlife, written with the poet's enemies in the right places.
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899
A river journey inward, told by a man on a boat on the Thames.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886
A respectable doctor invents a way to stop being himself.
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka · 1915
A salesman wakes as an insect and his family adapts — quite well.
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927
A summer house, a postponed trip, and ten years passing in a bracket.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932
A world that has abolished pain and, with it, most of what makes a life.
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck · 1937
Two migrant workers and a farm they will never own.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939
A family drives west into a promise that has been sold already.
The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux · 1910
An opera house with a fifth cellar and a tenant nobody has seen.
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett · 1953
Two men wait beside a tree for someone who does not come.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1949
A state that does not just punish dissent but edits the language you dissent in.
Animal Farm
George Orwell · 1945
A revolution that becomes a management problem, then a dictatorship.
Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954
Boys on an island discover what they have already been taught.
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger · 1951
Three days in a city with a boy who cannot stop noticing what is fake.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960
A trial seen from the height of a child's eyes.
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955
The most beautiful prose in the room, doing the ugliest possible work.
Dune
Frank Herbert · 1965
A desert planet, a spice, and a prophecy engineered by people who profit from it.
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954
A small person carries the one thing nobody powerful can be trusted with.
A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin · 1996
Everyone has a claim, and the claims do not agree.
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood · 1985
A theocracy that renames women after the men who own them.
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1963
A brilliant student watches her own mind become the weather.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 1982
Letters to God, then letters to a sister, and a self assembling in between.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 1966
The first Mrs Rochester gets to tell it herself.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
A family repeats its names, its mistakes and its wars for a century.
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981
A boy born at the exact hour of independence, wired to the country's fate.
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy · 1997
Twins, a river, and one afternoon that the whole novel circles.
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami · 1987
A student, two women, and a decade spent not recovering.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2015
Four friends, and the question of whether love can repair a person.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck · 1952
Two families, one valley, and the oldest story retold as a choice.
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987
A house, a ghost, and a history that will not stay in the past tense.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini · 2007
Two women in Kabul, three decades, one house.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe · 1839
A house, a brother, a sister, and a crack down the middle of everything.
The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe · 1843
A murderer explains, calmly, why he is not mad.
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe · 1842
A prince locks the plague out and holds a party in colour-coded rooms.
The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe · 1846
A man takes his enemy down to the cellar to taste a wine that does not exist.
The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe · 1843
A man who loves animals becomes the thing he most fears.
The Call of Cthulhu
H. P. Lovecraft · 1928
A case file assembled from notes, clippings and a sailor's account.
The Shadow over Innsmouth
H. P. Lovecraft · 1936
A traveller reaches a decaying town with a church that is not a church.
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · 1898
A governess, two children, and two figures nobody else admits to seeing.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1892
A woman is prescribed rest in a room and starts reading the wallpaper.
Carmilla
Sheridan Le Fanu · 1872
A guest stays at a lonely house and grows tired, and pale, and affectionate.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving · 1820
A schoolmaster, a rival, a horse race, and one very effective rumour.
Young Goodman Brown
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1835
A man walks into the woods and sees everyone he trusts.
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe · 1794
A castle, a heroine, and a great deal of unexplained terror.
The Monk
Matthew Lewis · 1796
A saintly monk, a sorcerer, a nun, and a descent with no brakes.
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson · 1959
Four people stay in a house that is not sane, and one of them is not sure she is.