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 →The Tyger
William Blake · 1794
Six burning questions about who could possibly build something so fierce.
The Canterbury Tales — General Prologue
Geoffrey Chaucer · c. 1387
Thirty pilgrims, one storytelling contest, and a poet pretending to be naive.
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.
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.
Death, be not proud
John Donne · 1633
A sonnet that argues with death and wins on a technicality.
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold · 1867
A honeymoon poem that ends on a battlefield.
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850
A love sonnet that measures itself against everything, including death.
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson · c. 1863
Death as a courteous driver, and eternity as a roof.
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
Three brothers, one murdered father, and the question of whether anything is permitted.
Villette
Charlotte Brontë · 1853
A plain, brilliant, furious woman makes a life on her own terms.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850
A letter of shame becomes the only honest thing in the town.
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1321
A guided tour of the afterlife, written with the poet's enemies in the right places.
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett · 1953
Two men wait beside a tree for someone who does not come.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 1982
Letters to God, then letters to a sister, and a self assembling in between.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck · 1952
Two families, one valley, and the oldest story retold as a choice.
Young Goodman Brown
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1835
A man walks into the woods and sees everyone he trusts.
The Monk
Matthew Lewis · 1796
A saintly monk, a sorcerer, a nun, and a descent with no brakes.