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 →A Tale of Two Cities — Opening
Charles Dickens · 1859
The most famous opening sentence in fiction, and what it's actually doing.
The Gettysburg Address
Abraham Lincoln · 1863
272 words that quietly rewrote what a country is for.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats · 1919
Twenty-two lines that every crisis since 1919 has been quoted into.
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold · 1867
A honeymoon poem that ends on a battlefield.
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.
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1848
A fair with no heroes, and one woman determined to win at it.
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 Iliad
Homer · c. 750 BC
The last weeks of a siege, and the rage of one man inside it.
A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin · 1996
Everyone has a claim, and the claims do not agree.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini · 2007
Two women in Kabul, three decades, one house.