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 →Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley · 1818
A broken statue, a desert, and the longest-lasting boast in English.
The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln · 1863
272 words that quietly rewrote what a country is for.
Beowulf
Anonymous · c. 700–1000
Where English literature starts: a hall, a monster, and a poem built on alliteration.
Macbeth — The Dagger Soliloquy
William Shakespeare · 1606
A man argues with a dagger he knows perfectly well isn't there.
Doctor Faustus — The Bargain
Christopher Marlowe · c. 1592
The bargain with the devil that English drama never got over.
Paradise Lost — The Invocation
John Milton · 1667
The epic in which the villain quietly gets the best lines.
An Essay on Man
Alexander Pope · 1733
Eighteenth-century philosophy in couplets that close like lids.
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 1816
A poem Coleridge claimed he dreamed, and then lost.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats · 1919
Twenty-two lines that every crisis since 1919 has been quoted into.
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift · 1729
The most savage joke in English, delivered in the calmest voice.
London
William Blake · 1794
A city where every institution is a lock, and every face is a record of it.
My Last Duchess
Robert Browning · 1842
A monologue in which the speaker condemns himself while being perfectly polite.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen · 1917
The Latin tag that patriotic poetry loved, taken apart in a gas attack.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
Five families, one invasion, and history refusing to be anyone's plan.
King Lear
William Shakespeare · 1606
A king divides his kingdom by asking his daughters to flatter him.
The Tempest
William Shakespeare · 1611
A magician on an island stages a shipwreck for his enemies.
The Iliad
Homer · c. 750 BC
The last weeks of a siege, and the rage of one man inside it.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1949
A state that does not just punish dissent but edits the language you dissent in.
Animal Farm
George Orwell · 1945
A revolution that becomes a management problem, then a dictatorship.
Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954
Boys on an island discover what they have already been taught.
Dune
Frank Herbert · 1965
A desert planet, a spice, and a prophecy engineered by people who profit from it.
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954
A small person carries the one thing nobody powerful can be trusted with.
A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin · 1996
Everyone has a claim, and the claims do not agree.
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood · 1985
A theocracy that renames women after the men who own them.