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 Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880
Three brothers, one murdered father, and the question of whether anything is permitted.
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott · 1868
Four sisters growing up while the money runs out.
King Lear
William Shakespeare · 1606
A king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to flatter him.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
William Shakespeare · 1608
A prince loses everything at sea and spends a lifetime getting it back.
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.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939
A family drives west into a promise that has been sold already.
A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin · 1996
Everyone has a claim, and the claims do not agree.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
A family repeats its names, its mistakes and its wars for a century.
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy · 1997
Twins, a river, and one afternoon that the whole novel circles.
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.