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.
No Man Is an Island
John Donne · 1624
The sentence that gave Hemingway a title and everyone else a funeral reading.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot · 1915
A middle-aged man rehearsing a question he will never ask.
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.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · 1844
A man returns from prison with a fortune and a list.
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.
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 Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · 1876
A boy, a fence, a treasure, and a town that can be fooled.
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare · 1595
Four lovers, six actors, one forest, and a very petty fairy king.
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 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.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932
A world that has abolished pain and, with it, most of what makes a life.
The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux · 1910
An opera house with a fifth cellar and a tenant nobody has seen.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1949
A state that does not just punish dissent but edits the language you dissent in.
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger · 1951
Three days in a city with a boy who cannot stop noticing what is fake.
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955
The most beautiful prose in the room, doing the ugliest possible work.
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1963
A brilliant student watches her own mind become the weather.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 1966
The first Mrs Rochester gets to tell it herself.
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981
A boy born at the exact hour of independence, wired to the country's fate.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2015
Four friends, and the question of whether love can repair a person.
The Shadow over Innsmouth
H. P. Lovecraft · 1936
A traveller reaches a decaying town with a church that is not a church.
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.