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 →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 Canterbury Tales — General Prologue
Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1387
Thirty pilgrims, one storytelling contest, and a poet pretending to be naive.
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.
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.
Huckleberry Finn — Opening
Mark Twain · 1884
A boy explaining himself in a grammar that is the whole novel.
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.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 1890
A portrait ages so that its subject does not.
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866
A student commits a murder to prove a theory, then has to live inside it.
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.
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy · 1874
A woman inherits a farm and three very different kinds of love.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1892
Twelve cases, one method: observe, then reason backwards.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · 1876
A boy, a fence, a treasure, and a town that can be fooled.
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899
A river journey inward, told by a man on a boat on the Thames.
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka · 1915
A salesman wakes as an insect and his family adapts — quite well.
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.
Animal Farm
George Orwell · 1945
A revolution that becomes a management problem, then a dictatorship.
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy · 1997
Twins, a river, and one afternoon that the whole novel circles.
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe · 1842
A prince locks the plague out and holds a party in colour-coded rooms.