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.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth · 1807
Ten thousand daffodils, and the memory that keeps on paying out.
A Tale of Two Cities — Opening
Charles Dickens · 1859
The most famous opening sentence in fiction, and what it's actually doing.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats · 1919
Twenty-two lines that every crisis since 1919 has been quoted into.
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.
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.
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.
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell · 1681
A seduction argument built like a syllogism, with a graveyard in the middle.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
William Wordsworth · 1802
London at dawn, seen as though nobody had ever looked at it before.
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.
A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns · 1794
The simplest promise in English poetry, and the longest one.
Ulysses
Alfred, Lord Tennyson · 1842
An old hero refusing the only thing left to him: rest.
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 1850
A love sonnet that measures itself against everything, including death.
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson · c. 1863
Death as a courteous driver, and eternity as a roof.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot · 1915
A middle-aged man rehearsing a question he will never ask.
The Great Gatsby — Closing
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925
The last page of the American dream, written in the tense it describes.
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869
Five families, one invasion, and history refusing to be anyone's plan.
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.
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett · 1953
Two men wait beside a tree for someone who does not come.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
A family repeats its names, its mistakes and its wars for a century.