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 →I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth · 1807
Ten thousand daffodils, and the memory that keeps on paying out.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost · 1916
The poem everyone quotes as wisdom, and misreads as advice.
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe · 1845
The poem engineered, beat by beat, to get inside your head.
The Waste Land — Opening
T. S. Eliot · 1922
The poem that broke English verse open, starting with a contradiction.
Mrs Dalloway — Opening
Virginia Woolf · 1925
One June day in London, told from inside a mind.
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
William Wordsworth · 1798
Returning to a place to find that the person who first saw it has gone.
Persuasion
Jane Austen · 1817
The second chance, eight years late.
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927
A summer house, a postponed trip, and ten years passing in a bracket.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
A family repeats its names, its mistakes and its wars for a century.
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981
A boy born at the exact hour of independence, wired to the country's fate.
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.
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987
A house, a ghost, and a history that will not stay in the past tense.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving · 1820
A schoolmaster, a rival, a horse race, and one very effective rumour.