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 →Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
William Shakespeare · 1609
The love poem that quietly promises to outlive every summer.
Pride and Prejudice — Opening
Jane Austen · 1813
One ironic sentence that dismantles an entire marriage market.
She Walks in Beauty
Lord Byron · 1815
The most carefully balanced compliment ever paid in English verse.
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.
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.
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell · 1681
A seduction argument built like a syllogism, with a graveyard in the middle.
La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats · 1819
A ballad with one question, one answer, and no cure.
A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns · 1794
The simplest promise in English poetry, and the longest one.
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850
A love sonnet that measures itself against everything, including death.
The Great Gatsby — Closing
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925
The last page of the American dream, written in the tense it describes.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847
Two houses, one moor, and a love that refuses to stay buried.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
Five families, one invasion, and history refusing to be anyone's plan.
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1878
One affair, one marriage, and a society that grants forgiveness unevenly.
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.
Villette
Charlotte Brontë · 1853
A plain, brilliant, furious woman makes a life on her own terms.
Othello
William Shakespeare · 1603
One rumour, repeated by a friend, destroys a marriage.
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 Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1321
A guided tour of the afterlife, written with the poet's enemies in the right places.
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy · 1997
Twins, a river, and one afternoon that the whole novel circles.
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami · 1987
A student, two women, and a decade spent not recovering.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2015
Four friends, and the question of whether love can repair a person.