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 Road Not Taken
Robert Frost · 1916
The poem everyone quotes as wisdom, and misreads as advice.
The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln · 1863
272 words that quietly rewrote what a country is for.
Paradise Lost — The Invocation
John Milton · 1667
The epic in which the villain quietly gets the best lines.
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1820
A poet asking the weather to use him as an instrument.
Huckleberry Finn — Opening
Mark Twain · 1884
A boy explaining himself in a grammar that is the whole novel.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · 1844
A man returns from prison with a fortune and a list.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · 1876
A boy, a fence, a treasure, and a town that can be fooled.
The Tempest
William Shakespeare · 1611
A magician on an island stages a shipwreck for his enemies.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932
A world that has abolished pain and, with it, most of what makes a life.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1949
A state that does not just punish dissent but edits the language you dissent in.
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.
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.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman · 1892
A woman is prescribed rest in a room and starts reading the wallpaper.