Old stories.
Told for today.

1200 BC · Retold

“The oldest great story in the world: Gilgamesh, the restless, overbearing king of Uruk, finds a friend in the wild man Enkidu; together they kill the guardian of the Cedar Forest and the Bull of Heaven — and when Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh sets out across the edge of the world to find the one man who escaped death.”

750 BC · Retold

“In the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles, the greatest of the Greek warriors, quarrels with King Agamemnon and withdraws from the fighting — until the death of his dearest friend drives him back into battle, against Hector, the defender of Troy.”

700 BC · Free

“After ten years of war and ten more of wandering, Odysseus fights his way home to a wife, a son and a house overrun by suitors.”

700 BC · Retold

“Hesiod's song of the birth of the gods: how Chaos, Earth and Love came first; how Sky was overthrown by his son Kronos, and Kronos by his son Zeus; how the Titans were cast down into Tartarus; and how Zeus, with justice and cunning, became king of gods and men.”

700 BC · Retold

“A farmer-poet scolds his lazy brother, who cheated him of his inheritance with the help of corrupt judges — and teaches him, and us, about justice, the ages of the world, the hard necessity of work, and the farmer's year by the rising and setting of the stars.”

458 BC · Retold

“Three plays of the curse on the house of Atreus: King Agamemnon comes home from Troy and is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra; their son Orestes avenges him by killing his mother, and is pursued by the Furies; and the goddess Athena founds the first court of law in Athens to judge him.”

445 BC · Retold

“At Troy, the great warrior Ajax, denied the armour of Achilles, sets out at night to kill the Greek commanders — and the goddess Athena drives him mad, so that he slaughters the army's cattle instead. When he wakes to his disgrace, the proudest hero of the Greeks must decide how to live, or die, with honour.”

441 BC · Retold

“After a civil war in which both of Oedipus's sons have died, King Creon of Thebes forbids anyone to bury the brother who attacked the city. Their sister Antigone buries him anyway, for the unwritten laws of the gods — and the clash between her conscience and his law destroys them both.”

440 BC · Retold

“Deianeira, wife of the hero Heracles, waits anxiously at Trachis for her wandering husband. When he sends home a beautiful captive girl he means to make his mistress, Deianeira tries to win back his love with a charm given her long ago by a dying centaur — and destroys him, and herself.”

429 BC · Retold

“A plague is destroying Thebes, and the oracle says it will end only when the murderer of the old king is found. King Oedipus, the clever outsider who once saved the city by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, swears to find him — and step by step uncovers the truth about himself.”

413 BC · Retold

“Years after her father Agamemnon was murdered by her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, Electra lives in the palace of Mycenae like a servant, mourning and raging, waiting for her brother Orestes to come home and take revenge. Then a messenger brings news that Orestes is dead.”

401 BC · Retold

“Blind, old and exiled, Oedipus wanders with his daughter Antigone to Colonus, near Athens, where an oracle has told him he will die. Thebes and his own sons now want his body, which will bring blessing to the land that holds it; but Oedipus has chosen Athens, and King Theseus — and the gods call him at last to a mysterious end.”

375 BC · Free

“Over one long night in the Piraeus, Socrates and his friends build an ideal city in words to discover what justice is, and why the just life is the happiest.”

180 · Retold

“The private notebook of a Roman emperor, written in Greek on campaign and at court: twelve books of reminders to himself about duty, death, anger, change, and how to stay good in a world that will not cooperate.”

1295 · Retold

“Dante's little book of memory: how he first saw Beatrice when they were both nine years old, how her greeting filled him with bliss and her refusal of it with despair, how he learned to write only in her praise — and how, after her death, he resolved to say of her what had never been said of any woman.”

1305 · Retold

“Dante's unfinished Latin treatise 'On Eloquence in the Vernacular': where human language came from, why it split into many tongues at Babel, how the dialects of Italy differ — and how an Italian poet might find, among them all, a single noble language fit for the highest poetry.”

1307 · Retold

“Exiled from Florence, Dante lays a 'banquet' of knowledge for those who hunger for it but have no Latin: three of his own love poems, served with long commentaries in Italian that reveal the lady they praise as Philosophy herself — and range over the heavens, the soul, the meaning of nobility, and the ages of a human life.”

1318 · Retold

“Dante's Latin treatise on world government: why humanity needs a single universal ruler to live in peace; why that rule belongs by right to the Roman Empire; and why the Emperor's authority comes directly from God, and not through the Pope.”

1320 · Retold

“Dante's thirteen surviving Latin letters, written in exile: to cardinals and counts, to a fellow poet, to the cities and princes of Italy, to the Emperor Henry VII — whom he hoped would bring him home — to a friend in Florence, refusing a humiliating pardon, and to his patron Can Grande, explaining the meaning of the Divine Comedy.”

1321 · Retold

“In the middle of his life, lost in a dark wood, the poet Dante is led by the shade of Virgil down through the circles of Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory, and then by his beloved Beatrice through the heavens of Paradise — to the vision of God.”

1353 · Retold

“In the plague year of 1348, seven young women and three young men leave dying Florence for the hills, and for ten days, to pass the hottest hours, each tells a story — a hundred tales of saints who were rogues, merchants and pirates, lovers happy and unhappy, clever wives, foolish husbands, and noble deeds. Boccaccio's 'human comedy,' written, he says, for ladies in love.”

1521 · Retold

“In a shaded Florentine garden, a famous condottiere tells a circle of young friends why Italy keeps losing its wars, and how a citizen army built on Roman lines could win them again.”

1531 · Retold

“Reading the Roman historian Livy among friends in a Florentine garden, Machiavelli asks why the Roman Republic grew so great and lasted so long, and what modern cities could learn from it about liberty, conflict, religion, war and decay.”

1532 · Retold

“Commissioned by the Medici, the disgraced former secretary of the Florentine Republic tells the history of his city from the barbarian invasions to the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent — a story of factions, exiles, revolts, conspiracies and hired armies, and of how a city can grow great while tearing itself apart.”

1532 · Retold

“A dismissed Florentine diplomat, writing in exile, offers the new rulers of his city a short handbook on how states are won, held and lost — drawn from ancient history and from the princes, popes and condottieri he had watched at close quarters.”

1551 · Retold

“A stingy old Dubrovnik merchant chases his spendthrift son to carnival-time Rome, where a clever servant named Pomet runs rings around them both.”

1585 · Retold

“Cervantes' first book, a pastoral romance in prose and verse. On the banks of the Tagus two shepherds, the courtly Elicio and the simple Erastro, love the fair Galatea and stay friends; around them other shepherds and wanderers tell their stories of love, murder, friendship and disdain — until Galatea's father promises her to a stranger, and the shepherds gather to stop it.”

1597 · Retold

“King Richard II, eloquent, extravagant and certain of his divine right, banishes his cousin Henry Bolingbroke and seizes his inheritance. Bolingbroke returns with an army — and the anointed king, abandoned by his nobles, must give up his crown, and finds his voice only as he loses everything.”

1597 · Retold

“After the Wars of the Roses, Richard, Duke of Gloucester — brilliant, charming, bitter and utterly ruthless — sets out to clear every life that stands between him and the English crown: his brother, his nephews, his allies and his wife. Then the ghosts of his victims come to him on the eve of Bosworth.”

1598 · Retold

“King Henry IV, who took his crown from Richard II, faces rebellion from the fiery Hotspur and the Percy family — while his own son, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat, witty, lying, irresistible Sir John Falstaff. On the field of Shrewsbury, the prince must at last become himself.”

1600 · Retold

“Four young Athenian lovers run away into an enchanted wood on a midsummer night, where the quarrelling King and Queen of the Fairies and the mischievous Puck turn their hearts upside down — while a troupe of amateur actors rehearses a tragedy, and one of them is given the head of an ass.”

1600 · Retold

“The rebellion is broken but not ended, and King Henry IV is sick and sleepless. Falstaff, old and gouty, recruits soldiers in Gloucestershire and dreams of the day his friend Hal will be king. That day comes — and the new King Henry V does not know him.”

1600 · Retold

“The wild Prince Hal of Henry IV has become King Henry V. Claiming the crown of France, he leads a small English army across the Channel, takes Harfleur, and — sick, outnumbered and exhausted — faces the whole French chivalry on the field of Agincourt.”

1600 · Retold

“In Messina, the young soldier Claudio falls in love with gentle Hero, while her cousin Beatrice and the confirmed bachelor Benedick wage a merry war of wit. Their friends trick the two sharpest tongues in Sicily into love — and a villain's trick nearly destroys Hero on her wedding day.”

1600 · Retold

“To help his friend Bassanio woo the rich heiress Portia, the Venetian merchant Antonio borrows money from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender he has publicly scorned — on the bond that, if he cannot repay, Shylock may cut a pound of his flesh. When Antonio's ships are lost, Shylock demands his bond.”

1603 · Retold

“Prince Hamlet of Denmark is visited by his father's ghost, who tells him he was murdered by his own brother — now king, and married to Hamlet's mother. Charged with revenge, the brilliant, grieving, doubting prince feigns madness, and sets in motion a tragedy that will consume the whole court.”

1605 · Retold

“A poor gentleman of La Mancha reads so many books of chivalry that he loses his wits, and rides out in rusty armour on a bony nag to right the world's wrongs, with a peasant neighbour, Sancho Panza, as his squire. Windmills become giants, inns castles, and a farm girl the peerless Dulcinea — until, at the end of two great Parts, the knight comes home and wakes from his dream.”

1608 · Retold

“Old King Lear divides his kingdom between the two daughters who flatter him and banishes the one who truly loves him. Cast out by those he enriched, he wanders mad on the heath in a storm, while the loyal Earl of Gloucester, betrayed by his own son, pays a terrible price.”

1617 · Retold

“Cervantes' last book, finished on his deathbed: a 'northern story' in the manner of Heliodorus. Two young pilgrims of wonderful beauty, Periandro and Auristela, who call themselves brother and sister, travel from the frozen islands of the North — barbarians, shipwrecks, kings in love — through Portugal, Spain and France to Rome, where at last their true names and their love are revealed.”

1622 · Retold

“Othello, a Moorish general in the service of Venice, secretly marries Desdemona, a senator's daughter. His ensign Iago, who hates him, sets out to destroy him — and with a handkerchief, a few whispered hints and a genius for lies, persuades him that his innocent wife is unfaithful.”

1623 · Retold

“Banished from her usurping uncle's court, Rosalind flees to the Forest of Arden disguised as a young man, with her cousin Celia and the court fool. There she finds her banished father, a melancholy philosopher, and Orlando — the young man she loves, who is hanging love poems to her on every tree.”

1623 · Retold

“Rome, 44 BC. Fearing that the triumphant Julius Caesar will make himself king, a group of senators led by the envious Cassius and the noble Brutus stab him to death in the Capitol — and then lose Rome to the eloquence of his friend Mark Antony, and themselves to civil war.”

1623 · Retold

“Three witches on a Scottish heath tell the victorious general Macbeth that he shall be king. Urged on by his wife, he murders his king and takes the crown — and then must kill and kill again to keep it, as guilt, fear and prophecy close in on him.”

1623 · Retold

“In Padua, the gentle Bianca cannot marry until her sharp-tongued elder sister Katherina is wed. Enter Petruchio, a swaggering adventurer who has come to wive it wealthily — and who sets out to 'tame' Kate, while Bianca's suitors fill her father's house with disguises.”

1623 · Retold

“Shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, Viola disguises herself as a young man and enters the service of Duke Orsino — who sends her to woo the Countess Olivia for him. Olivia falls in love with the messenger, Viola falls in love with the Duke, and then Viola's twin brother, whom she believes drowned, comes to town.”

1668 · Retold

“After the fall of Troy, Hector's widow Andromache is the captive of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, king of Epirus. Pyrrhus loves her and neglects his promised bride Hermione; Orestes, who loves Hermione, comes as the Greeks' ambassador to demand Hector's little son. Each loves one who loves another, and the chain of passion ends at the altar in murder, death and madness.”

1719 · Retold

“Shipwrecked alone on an island for twenty-eight years, a restless young Englishman learns to build, farm, pray and finally to live with another human being.”

1750 · Retold

“The essay that made Rousseau famous. Asked by the Academy of Dijon whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has helped to purify morals, the 'Citizen of Geneva' answered no: learning, letters and the arts, born of our vices, have spread garlands of flowers over our chains, softened our courage, and taught us to seem virtuous instead of being so.”

1755 · Retold

“Rousseau's Second Discourse. Stripping away everything society has added to human nature, he imagines man in the state of nature — solitary, robust, free, moved only by self-love and pity — and then tells the long story of how he lost that state: through the family, the hut, the village dance, iron and corn, and at last the man who first fenced a field and said 'This is mine.' Property, law and government, he concludes, have fixed for ever an inequality that nature never made.”

1755 · Retold

“The young Kant's bold cosmology: the Milky Way is a flattened disc of stars, the faint 'nebulae' are other such systems, and the solar system formed by purely mechanical, Newtonian laws out of a primordial cloud of scattered matter — the first version of the 'nebular hypothesis.' Creation, he argues, is never finished, but spreads endlessly through infinite space; and he ends with speculations on the inhabitants of other planets.”

1759 · Retold

“Kicked out of a Westphalian castle for kissing the baron's daughter, a young man raised to believe that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds is flung across Europe and the Americas through war, earthquake, Inquisition and shipwreck, to find out whether his tutor was right.”

1761 · Retold

“'Letters of two lovers living in a little town at the foot of the Alps.' Julie d'Étange, a baron's daughter, and her tutor, a young commoner later called Saint-Preux, fall in love beside Lake Geneva; her father forbids the match and gives her to the wise, cold M. de Wolmar. Years later, Wolmar invites the former lover to live with them at Clarens — and a novel of passion becomes a novel of virtue, friendship and faith, until Julie's death reveals what her heart had never ceased to feel.”

1762 · Retold

“Rousseau imagines himself the tutor of an ordinary boy, Emile, and follows him from birth to marriage, to show how a man might be raised according to nature rather than against it: free of swaddling and of books in childhood, taught by things rather than words, given a trade, led to religion through the conscience in the 'Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar' — and at last given a companion, Sophie.”

1762 · Retold

“'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' Rousseau asks what could make political authority legitimate, and answers: a pact by which each gives himself wholly to the community and so obeys only himself. From this social contract he derives the sovereignty of the people and the general will, the nature of law, the forms of government, the danger of representatives, and the civil religion that binds citizens to their republic.”

1764 · Retold

“The young Kant's elegant essay, written more as an observer of human nature than as a philosopher: on the two kinds of 'finer feeling' — for the sublime, which moves, and the beautiful, which charms — as they show themselves in nature, in human qualities and temperaments, in the relations of the sexes and in the characters of nations. Its last two sections reflect the prejudices of its age.”

1781 · Retold

“Kant asks what reason can know without experience, and answers with a 'Copernican revolution': space and time are forms of our intuition, and the categories, such as cause and substance, are rules of our understanding, so that we can know the world a priori as it appears to us — but never as it is in itself. Reason's attempts to know the soul, the world as a whole, and God end in illusion; and so knowledge is limited, to make room for faith.”

1782 · Retold

“'I want to show my fellows a man in all the truth of nature; and this man will be myself.' Rousseau tells his life from his birth in Geneva in 1712 to his expulsion from the Island of Saint-Pierre in 1765: the runaway apprentice, the years with Madame de Warens at Les Charmettes, Venice and Paris, Thérèse and the children he abandoned, the sudden fame of the Discourses, 'Julie' and 'Emile,' the persecutions — hiding nothing, he says, of his faults.”

1782 · Retold

“In letters to each other, two brilliant aristocratic libertines plot the seduction of a convent girl and a virtuous wife, until their game destroys everyone, themselves included.”

1782 · Retold

“Rousseau's last book, written in the two years before his death: ten 'walks,' in which the old man, convinced that the world has conspired against him, gives up the struggle and talks with his own soul — of an accident on the road to Ménilmontant, of lying, of the Island of Saint-Pierre where he drifted in a boat and was 'sufficient to himself like God,' of plants, of charity, of children, and, in an unfinished last page, of Madame de Warens fifty years before.”

1783 · Retold

“Kant's short, clearer restatement of the 'Critique of Pure Reason,' written for teachers and readers who had found the Critique too difficult. Woken from his 'dogmatic slumber' by Hume, he asks how pure mathematics, pure natural science and metaphysics are possible — and concludes that metaphysics can become a science only through critique.”

1784 · Retold

“Kant's short, famous essay defines enlightenment as humanity's emergence from its self-incurred immaturity — the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance — and gives it a motto: 'Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!' Its condition is freedom: the freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters.”

1785 · Retold

“Kant's short foundational work in ethics seeks the supreme principle of morality. Starting from the idea that nothing is good without limitation except a good will, it arrives at the categorical imperative — act only on a maxim you could will as a universal law; treat humanity always as an end, never merely as a means — and grounds it in the autonomy and freedom of rational beings.”

1785 · Retold

“A gentleman officer calmly recounts how he rode a cannonball, climbed to the moon on a bean stalk and pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair.”

1788 · Retold

“Kant's second Critique shows that pure reason can be practical: that the moral law, which commands unconditionally, is a 'fact of reason' through which we know ourselves to be free. Duty, not happiness, is the ground of morality; respect for the law is its only motive; and the hope that virtue and happiness may at last be united leads reason to postulate immortality and God. It ends with the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”

1790 · Retold

“Kant's third Critique seeks to bridge the gulf between nature and freedom through the power of judgement. It asks what it means to call something beautiful or sublime — a pleasure without interest, valid for everyone, without a concept — explores genius and fine art, and then asks how we can understand living things as purposes, and the whole of nature as having a final end in man as a moral being.”

1793 · Retold

“Kant asks what remains of Christianity when it is read by reason alone. He finds in human nature a 'radical evil' — a propensity to put self-love above the moral law — that can be overcome only by a revolution of the heart; reads the Son of God as the ideal of moral perfection in our reason; describes the church as an 'ethical commonwealth' on the way to a pure religion of reason; and condemns as 'counterfeit service' every attempt to please God by anything except a good life.”

1795 · Retold

“Written in the form of a peace treaty, Kant's short book sets out the conditions for ending war forever: preliminary articles forbidding secret reservations, standing armies and interference in other states; and three definitive articles — a republican constitution in every state, a federation of free states, and a cosmopolitan right of hospitality. Nature itself, he argues, guarantees that peace will come.”

1797 · Retold

“Kant's mature system of ethics and law, built on the principle laid down in the 'Groundwork.' The Doctrine of Right sets out the rights of persons, property, contract, the state and punishment, the law of nations and the hope of perpetual peace; the Doctrine of Virtue sets out the duties we have to ourselves and to others, as ends we are bound to adopt — our own perfection and the happiness of others.”

1798 · Retold

“Kant's popular lectures on human nature, given for some thirty years and published near the end of his life: on the senses, imagination, memory, dreams and genius; pleasure, boredom, taste and the art of the dinner party; emotions and passions; temperament and character; and the human species, destined to cultivate, civilise and moralise itself in society.”

1801 · Retold

“Hegel's first book, written when he arrived in Jena to join his friend Schelling: an essay arguing that philosophy arises from the divisions of modern life, that its task is to overcome fixed oppositions, and that Schelling, not Fichte, had grasped the true principle — the absolute identity of subject and object, of nature and spirit.”

1803 · Retold

“Kant's lectures on education — known in English also as 'On Education' — argue that the human being is the only creature that must be educated, and can become human only through education. They set out the stages of discipline, culture, civilisation and moralisation; give practical advice on the care and physical training of children, the cultivation of the mind, and the forming of moral character; and ask the central question: how can freedom be cultivated under constraint?”

1807 · Retold

“Hegel's first great work traces the journey of consciousness from the simplest certainty — 'this, here, now' — through perception, self-consciousness, the struggle of master and servant, reason, the history of ethical life, culture and revolution, morality and religion, to 'absolute knowing': spirit that comprehends itself and its own history.”

1811 · Retold

“When their father dies, the Dashwood sisters lose their home and fortune and move to a Devonshire cottage, where sensible Elinor hides a heartbreak and passionate Marianne throws herself into love with the dashing Willoughby.”

1812 · Retold

“Hegel's most ambitious work sets out to think the pure forms of thought themselves — beginning with the emptiest thought of all, 'being,' and showing how it passes into nothing and becoming, and so on, through quality, quantity and measure, essence, appearance and actuality, to the concept, the judgement, life, cognition and, at last, the 'absolute idea.'”

1813 · Retold

“Lively Elizabeth Bennet and proud Mr. Darcy misjudge each other from their first meeting, and must each overcome their own failings before they can see each other clearly.”

1814 · Retold

“Fanny Price, a poor relation taken in by her rich uncle at Mansfield Park, grows up quiet and overlooked — until the dazzling Crawfords arrive from London, and only she sees what they are.”

1815 · Retold

“Handsome, clever and rich, Emma Woodhouse has decided never to marry but to arrange everyone else's marriages in the village of Highbury — and gets nearly every one of them wrong, including her own.”

1817 · Retold

“Hegel's whole system in outline, written as a handbook for his students: the Logic, the pure forms of thought; the Philosophy of Nature, from space and time to the living animal; and the Philosophy of Spirit, from the soul and consciousness, through law, morality, the family, civil society and the state, to art, religion and philosophy itself.”

1817 · Retold

“Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, raised on Gothic novels, goes to Bath, makes false friends and a true one, and is invited to an ancient abbey — where she is sure some dreadful secret must be hidden.”

1817 · Retold

“Eight years after she was persuaded to break off her engagement to a penniless naval officer, Anne Elliot, overlooked by her vain family, meets Captain Wentworth again — rich, admired, and apparently indifferent to her.”

1818 · Retold

“A young scientist gives life to a creature assembled from the dead, abandons it in horror, and is pursued to the ends of the earth by its loneliness and revenge.”

1818 · Retold

“The world we see is only a picture in our minds; behind it lies a blind, endless will that causes all suffering, and from which art, compassion and renunciation offer the only escape.”

1823 · Retold

“Stendhal's two polemical pamphlets on the theatre, a manifesto of French Romanticism. Should tragedies written for the public of 1823 follow Racine or Shakespeare? Against the unities of time and place and the alexandrine, Stendhal argues for national tragedies in prose, defines laughter, and defines Romanticism as the art of giving each people the works that give it the most pleasure now — and, two years later, answers the Académie française's solemn condemnation of the Romantics.”

1827 · Retold

“Stendhal's first novel, subtitled 'Some Scenes from a Paris Salon in 1827.' Octave de Malivert, a brilliant, melancholy young nobleman with a secret he cannot tell, loves his proud, poor cousin Armance de Zohiloff — and she him — but pride, misunderstanding and the malice of others keep them apart, until it is too late.”

1830 · Retold

“Julien Sorel, the clever, proud son of a provincial carpenter, who worships Napoleon in a France where the age of glory is over, decides that the Church — the black — is now the only road to power. As tutor in the house of the mayor of Verrières, seminarian in Besançon and secretary to a great Paris nobleman, he climbs by hypocrisy and will, loving and loved by two very different women — until a single act destroys everything.”

1831 · Retold

“Paris, 1482: a beautiful street dancer, the deaf bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, the archdeacon who raised him and a handsome, careless captain are caught in a web of desire and cruelty around the great cathedral.”

1832 · Retold

“Hegel's lectures argue that religion and philosophy have the same content — God, the truth — and differ only in form. He sets out what religion is, then surveys the religions of the world, from magic and the religions of China, India, Persia and Egypt to the Jewish, Greek and Roman religions, and ends with Christianity as the 'consummate religion,' whose doctrines of Trinity, incarnation, death and spirit philosophy can comprehend.”

1833 · Retold

“A brisk Frenchman, Monsieur Sans-délai, comes to Madrid to trace his family, settle a claim and invest his fortune, and gives himself fifteen days to do it all. His Spanish friend bets him a dinner that he will still be there in fifteen months. Larra's most famous article on Spanish idleness: everyone — genealogist, tailor, clerk, ministry — answers the same three words.”

1833 · Retold

“Hegel tells the story of philosophy from Thales to his own day — not as a gallery of errors and rival opinions, but as the development of one reason, each philosophy a necessary stage, from water and number, being and becoming, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, through the long night of the Middle Ages, to Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and the idealism of his own age.”

1835 · Retold

“Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of art — also known in English as 'The Philosophy of Fine Art' — argue that beauty is the sensuous shining of the idea, trace art through its symbolic, classical and romantic forms, from the pyramids to Greek sculpture to Christian painting and music, survey architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry, and end with the claim that art, in its highest vocation, is for us a thing of the past.”

1837 · Retold

“Hegel's lectures on world history argue that reason governs the world, and that history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom — from the ancient East, where one alone was free, through the Greeks and Romans, where some were free, to the modern world, which knows that all are free.”

1838 · Retold

“A boy born in a workhouse asks for more, runs away to London, and falls among thieves, where the gentle Oliver becomes the prize in a struggle between Fagin's gang, the brutal Bill Sikes, the doomed Nancy, and the few good people who mean to save him.”

1839 · Retold

“Fabrice del Dongo, a young Italian nobleman who runs away at sixteen to fight for Napoleon at Waterloo, returns to a Lombardy ruled by Austria and a little court at Parma ruled by fear. Protected by his beautiful aunt, the Duchess Sanseverina, and her lover, the minister Count Mosca, he kills a man, is imprisoned in the Farnese Tower, and there falls in love with the governor's daughter, Clélia — in a story of passion, intrigue, escape and loss.”

1843 · Retold

“On Christmas Eve, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his dead partner and three Spirits, who show him his past, his present and his future.”

1844 · Retold

“Betrayed on his wedding day and buried alive for fourteen years in the Château d'If, the young sailor Edmond Dantès escapes, finds a hidden treasure, and returns to Paris as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo to reward the good and destroy the three men who ruined him.”

1844 · Retold

“In 1625 a hot-headed young Gascon, d'Artagnan, comes to Paris to join the King's Musketeers, befriends Athos, Porthos and Aramis, and is drawn into the duel between Cardinal Richelieu and the Queen — and into the path of the deadly Milady.”

1844 · Retold

“Schopenhauer's fifty supplementary chapters to his main work, including his famous essays on the primacy of the will, genius, music, death, sexual love and the suffering of life.”

1845 · Retold

“Guided by an angel, a poet's soul flies through the universe to learn why man was exiled from heaven, and discovers the story of Satan's rebellion and Adam's fall.”

1847 · Retold

“In a verse drama set in 18th-century Montenegro, a tormented prince-bishop decides to turn against his own people who have converted to Islam, in one of the most celebrated and most controversial works of Balkan literature.”

1848 · Retold

“A young man buys a book at the auction of a dead courtesan's belongings, and hears from her lover the story of Marguerite Gautier — the most fashionable woman in Paris, who gave up everything for love, and then gave up love for his sake.”

1850 · Retold

“David Copperfield tells his own life: a happy infancy ended by a cruel stepfather, child labour in a London warehouse, flight to an eccentric aunt, school, love, work as a writer — and the friends and enemies, Micawber, Steerforth, Uriah Heep, Peggotty and Agnes, who shape him.”

1850 · Retold

“In Holland in 1672, a peaceful tulip-grower is thrown into prison through a jealous neighbour and a political murder — and, with the help of his jailer's daughter, grows in his cell the black tulip that all Haarlem is waiting for.”

1851 · Retold

“A restless young sailor signs onto the Nantucket whaler Pequod with his new friend, the harpooneer Queequeg, and discovers that its captain, the one-legged Ahab, means to hunt down the white whale that maimed him — whatever it costs the ship and everyone in it.”

1853 · Retold

“While the endless Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce devours a fortune and the lives of its hopeful heirs, an orphan girl, Esther Summerson, comes to live at Bleak House — and a cold, proud lady of fashion, a dead law-copyist and a sharp-eyed lawyer lead toward the secret of Esther's birth.”

1855 · Retold

“Stendhal's unfinished novel of the July Monarchy. Lucien Leuwen, the idle, idealistic son of a witty Paris banker, is expelled from the École Polytechnique for republican sympathies and sent as a lancer to the provincial garrison of Nancy, where he falls in love with a reserved young royalist widow, Madame de Chasteller. Tricked into leaving her, he returns to Paris to learn the corruption of government from inside a ministry.”

1855 · Retold

“An old countrywoman leaves her mountain village to live with her daughter's family at the Old Bleachery, a lonely house in a green valley beneath a princess's castle. Through one turning year — its feasts and fairs, its floods and storms, the mill, the gamekeeper's lodge, a pilgrimage, a wedding — her wisdom, kindness and stories shape the lives of her grandchildren and her neighbours, and touch even the princess, the sad young countess, the lovers Kristla and Míla, and poor mad Viktorka of the woods.”

1857 · Retold

“A doctor's wife in provincial Normandy, raised on romantic novels, seeks in love affairs and luxury the life she dreamed of, and is ruined by it.”

1859 · Retold

“A doctor freed after eighteen years in the Bastille, his devoted daughter, the French aristocrat who renounces his family name to marry her, and the dissolute English lawyer who loves her in silence are drawn from London into the Paris of the Terror.”

1861 · Retold

“An orphan boy from the Kentish marshes is suddenly made a gentleman by a secret benefactor, and learns too late who it is, and what he has lost.”

1862 · Retold

“Released after nineteen years in the galleys for stealing bread, Jean Valjean is transformed by a bishop's mercy, raises an orphan as his own, and is hunted across France for twenty years by the policeman Javert — from the provinces to the barricades and sewers of Paris.”

1864 · Retold

“A spiteful, isolated former clerk in Petersburg rails against reason, progress and the 'crystal palace' of the future, then tells the story of a farewell dinner, a night in a brothel, and the young woman whose kindness he could not bear.”

1866 · Retold

“A poor student in St. Petersburg murders a pawnbroker to prove he is above ordinary morality, and finds he cannot live with what he has done.”

1867 · Retold

“'Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,' Volume I — the only volume Marx published himself. Starting from the humble commodity, Marx traces how money becomes capital, how capital draws surplus-value from the unpaid labour of the worker, how the struggle over the working day and the coming of machinery reshape industry, and how accumulation piles up wealth at one pole and misery at the other — until, in a history written 'in letters of blood and fire,' he shows how it all began.”

1869 · Retold

“Prince Myshkin, a gentle, epileptic young man returning to Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, is caught between two women — the proud, wounded Nastasya Filippovna and the general's daughter Aglaya — and between the passions of Petersburg society, where his goodness is taken for idiocy.”

1869 · Retold

“From a Petersburg drawing room in 1805 to the burning of Moscow and the retreat of Napoleon's army, the lives of three noble families — the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys and the awkward heir Pierre Bezukhov — are swept up in war, love, loss and the search for what makes a life worth living.”

1872 · Retold

“In a sleepy provincial town, an ageing liberal idealist watches his son organise a circle of conspirators around the magnetic, empty figure of Nikolai Stavrogin — until intrigue, arson and murder show what the fashionable ideas of the fathers have produced in the sons.”

1872 · Retold

“The young professor of classics Friedrich Nietzsche argues that Greek tragedy was born from the union of two opposed forces — the Apollonian dream of form and the Dionysian ecstasy of music — that it was killed by Socratic reason, and that it might be reborn in German music.”

1872 · Retold

“In a little house in Aksaray, a widow tells her son how she and his father once escaped a forced marriage. Then the son, Tal'at, loses his heart to Fitnat, the stepdaughter of a tobacconist who keeps her shut indoors; he disguises himself as a girl to become her friend — but her stepfather has promised her to a rich man of Üsküdar, Ali Bey, and an old injustice in that man's past turns the wedding into a tragedy.”

1876 · Retold

“A mischievous boy in a Mississippi River town tricks his friends into whitewashing a fence, runs away to be a pirate, witnesses a murder in a graveyard, and hunts for buried treasure.”

1878 · Retold

“A beautiful Petersburg wife meets a young cavalry officer at a Moscow railway station and gives up her husband, her son and her place in society for him, while across the same Russia a shy landowner, Levin, courts the girl who once refused him and searches for a reason to live.”

1878 · Retold

“In nine chapters of short aphorisms, Nietzsche turns from Wagner and metaphysics to a cool, historical, 'chemical' examination of morality, religion, art, society, women and the state — a book, as its subtitle says, for free spirits.”

1878 · Retold

“Thirteen stories of Prague's Malá Strana, the 'Lesser Quarter' beneath the castle, in the middle of the nineteenth century: a quiet house where a week brings a death, a betrothal, a lottery win and a marital battle; two old enemies at an inn table; a beggar ruined by gossip; a shopkeeper ruined by his pipe; a boy locked in the cathedral to see St Wenceslas say Mass; and a young lawyer who moves to the quarter for peace and finds nothing but neighbours.”

1880 · Retold

“In a small Russian town, a dissolute old landowner is murdered, and suspicion falls on his passionate eldest son — while his two other sons, the brilliant sceptic Ivan and the gentle novice Alyosha, are drawn into a struggle over guilt, faith, freedom and love.”

1881 · Retold

“In Tudor London, a beggar boy and Prince Edward, alike as twins, change clothes for a joke — and are each trapped in the other's life, the pauper on the throne and the true king wandering his kingdom as a ragged madman.”

1883 · Retold

“Jeanne, a convent-bred young noblewoman of Normandy, leaves school full of dreams of love, and finds instead a mean, unfaithful husband, a lifetime of small betrayals, and a son who breaks her heart — the humble truth of one woman's life, from seventeen to old age.”

1883 · Retold

“After ten years alone on his mountain, the prophet Zarathustra goes down among men to teach that God is dead, that man is something to be overcome, and — hardest of all — that everything returns eternally. A philosophical poem in the voice of scripture.”

1884 · Retold

“Escaping his drunken father and the people who want to 'sivilize' him, Huck Finn rafts down the Mississippi with Jim, a man fleeing slavery, and has to decide for himself what is right.”

1885 · Retold

“Georges Duroy, a penniless ex-soldier with a fine moustache and no scruples, arrives in the Paris newspaper world and climbs — through women, borrowed talent and political scandal — from a clerk's stool to wealth, a title and a seat at the gates of power.”

1885 · Retold

“'Capital,' Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital. Having shown in Volume I how surplus-value is produced, Marx follows capital out of the factory and into circulation — the changing shapes it takes as money, production and commodities, the time and costs of its turnover, and finally the great exchange between the two departments of social production by which a whole economy reproduces itself, year after year, on the same or an expanding scale.”

1885 · Free

“A jobless mechanic walks into a northern French coalfield in the dead of winter, goes down the Voreux pit beside the Maheu family, and becomes the leader of a strike that hunger, troops and the mine itself will try to crush.”

1886 · Retold

“On Christmas Eve, Vanka Zhukov, a nine-year-old orphan apprenticed to a Moscow shoemaker, secretly writes a letter to his grandfather in the village, begging him to come and take him home.”

1887 · Retold

“Nikolai Ivanov, a landowner of thirty-five, once full of energy and ideals, has burned out. Deep in debt, no longer loving the wife who gave up everything for him and is now dying, he drifts towards a young girl who believes she can save him — while the district gossips, and a self-righteous young doctor resolves to expose him.”

1887 · Retold

“A young red dog, half dachshund and half mongrel, loses her master, a drunken carpenter, in the streets on a winter evening. She is taken in by a kind stranger who lives with a gander, a cat and a pig — and is training them all for the circus.”

1887 · Retold

“At a little spa in the volcanic hills of Auvergne, a financier builds a new health resort on a peasant's land, while his young wife, sent there to take the waters, falls passionately in love with her brother's friend — a love that will not survive the child it brings.”

1888 · Retold

“In Le Havre, a family friend dies and leaves his whole fortune to the younger of two brothers. The elder, a jealous young doctor, begins to wonder why — and the question he cannot stop asking will tear his family's quiet life apart.”

1888 · Retold

“Writing from Turin, Nietzsche settles accounts with the composer he once worshipped: Wagner, he argues, is not a musician but a brilliant actor and a sickness of the age, and Bizet's Carmen shows what healthy, southern, light-footed music could be.”

1888 · Retold

“One July morning a nine-year-old boy, Yegorushka, is taken from his mother's home across the endless southern steppe, to be put to school in a distant town. Riding with his merchant uncle and an old priest, then on top of a wool convoy among rough, strange carters, he sees heat and storm, nights by the fire, a famous rich man everyone is hunting for — and the immense, lonely beauty of the land.”

1889 · Retold

“Knocked on the head in a Connecticut gun factory, Hank Morgan wakes in sixth-century Camelot, escapes the stake by predicting an eclipse, and sets out to modernise King Arthur's England — with newspapers, soap, telephones and, in the end, dynamite.”

1889 · Retold

“Stendhal's last, unfinished novel: Lamiel, a foundling brought up by a pious beadle and his wife in a Norman village, is taken up by a great lady and educated in cynicism by a clever, embittered hunchbacked doctor. Bored by the petty world around her and determined to know life for herself, she runs away to Paris in search of something worth loving — and finds it, at last, in a criminal.”

1889 · Retold

“Olivier Bertin, a celebrated Paris painter, has loved the Countess de Guilleroy for twelve years — until her daughter comes home from the country, the living image of the young woman he first painted, and the ageing artist finds himself falling in love with the past.”

1889 · Retold

“At a party, a rich banker bets a young lawyer two million roubles that he cannot endure fifteen years of solitary confinement. The lawyer accepts, and is shut up in a lodge in the banker's garden with nothing but books. Fifteen years later, the banker is ruined — and the prisoner has learned something neither of them expected.”

1890 · Retold

“André Mariolle, a rich, idle, sensitive Parisian, falls hopelessly in love with Michèle de Burne, a brilliant young widow who gathers admirers in her salon like trophies — and who can give him everything except the one thing he wants: her heart.”

1890 · Retold

“A beautiful young man wishes that his portrait would grow old instead of him, and lives a life of pleasure and crime while the painting records every sin.”

1890 · Retold

“A young governess receives a pearl every year from an unknown sender, and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson follow the trail to a stolen Indian treasure, a locked-room murder and a chase down the Thames.”

1890 · Retold

“A retired professor and his beautiful young wife come to live on a country estate, and the household falls apart around them: the professor's brother-in-law, who has worked for him all his life, despairs; a young doctor who plants forests — the 'Wood Demon' — loves the professor's daughter but judges everyone harshly. Chekhov's early comedy, which he later rebuilt as Uncle Vanya.”

1891 · Retold

“In a little town on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, Laevsky, an idle young official, is sick of the married woman he ran away with. A cold, brilliant zoologist, von Koren, despises him as a parasite who ought to be destroyed for the good of mankind. Their hatred ends in a duel at dawn — watched, from the bushes, by a young deacon who cannot stop laughing.”

1892 · Retold

“In a filthy provincial hospital, a gentle, idle doctor who has long since stopped trying to change anything finds, in the locked ward for the insane, the one intelligent man in town to talk to — and learns, too late, what his comfortable philosophy is worth.”

1894 · Retold

“'Capital,' Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. Marx descends from the hidden world of value and surplus-value to the forms in which capital shows itself on the surface of society: profit, the average rate of profit and prices of production, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, merchants' profit, interest and credit, the rent of land — and the 'trinity formula' in which capital, land and labour seem each to yield their own revenue, until the manuscript breaks off in the middle of a chapter on classes.”

1894 · Retold

“Yakov, an old coffin-maker in a poor little town, counts every day of his life as a loss. Only when his wife dies, and his own end draws near, does he see how much he wasted — and in his last hours he makes a gift to the man he has always tormented.”

1894 · Retold

“Kovrin, a brilliant young scholar worn out by overwork, goes to rest at the estate of his old guardian, a passionate fruit-grower, and his daughter Tanya. There he begins to see a phantom — a monk in black, who tells him that he is a genius, one of God's chosen. The visions make him happy; being cured of them ruins everyone he loves.”

1895 · Retold

“A Victorian inventor travels to the year 802,701, where humanity has split into the gentle Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks, and then on to the dying earth.”

1896 · Retold

“On a country estate by a lake, a young writer stages his strange new play to impress his mother, a famous actress, and the girl he loves — who falls instead for his mother's lover, a celebrated novelist. A comedy, Chekhov called it, in four acts: about art, fame, love, and wasted lives.”

1897 · Retold

“A young English solicitor travels to Transylvania to sell a London house to a Count, and finds himself a prisoner in a castle of horrors — while the Count sails for England, and a small band of friends must learn to fight a creature of the night.”

1897 · Retold

“For twenty-five years Ivan Voynitsky — Uncle Vanya — and his niece Sonya have worked a country estate to support a famous professor in the city. When the professor retires there with his beautiful young wife, everyone's quiet life is thrown into disorder — and Vanya realises that he has wasted his life on a fraud.”

1898 · Retold

“On a rainy morning at his farm, the landowner Alyokhin tells his two guests why he never married: for years he loved a friend's young wife, and she loved him — and neither of them ever said a word, until the day she left for ever.”

1898 · Retold

“Sheltering from the rain at a friend's farm, a veterinary surgeon tells the story of his brother, a petty clerk who gave up everything — even his wife's comfort — to buy a little estate where he could grow his own gooseberries. Seeing his brother's contentment, he understood something terrible about happiness.”

1898 · Retold

“Two friends, a veterinary surgeon and a schoolmaster, spend a night in a village barn after a day's hunting, and the schoolmaster tells of Belikov, a teacher of Greek who lived his whole life as if in a protective case — galoshes, umbrella, rules and dread — and who terrorised a whole town, until he tried to fall in love.”

1898 · Retold

“Martians land in the English countryside in great metal cylinders, and a narrator struggles to survive as their fighting machines and Black Smoke lay waste to London.”

1899 · Retold

“Sitting on a jury in Moscow, Prince Nekhlyudov recognises in the dock the young woman he seduced and abandoned years before, now a prostitute accused of poisoning; when she is wrongly sent to Siberia, he resolves to follow her and atone, and discovers the cruelty of the whole world he belongs to.”

1899 · Retold

“In Yalta, a bored Moscow banker who has had many affairs picks up a young married woman walking a little white dog. It is meant to be one more holiday adventure — but back in the Moscow winter he cannot forget her, and finds himself, for the first time in his life, really in love.”

1900 · Retold

“In a waterside mansion on the Bosphorus, Adnan Bey, a rich widower, marries the young and beautiful Bihter, daughter of the vain Firdevs Hanım. His daughter Nihal loses her father's whole heart; the household is upturned; and Bihter, bored and empty, turns to Adnan's charming, careless nephew Behlül. The forbidden love is watched in silence by a servant, Beşir, until the night it is discovered.”

1901 · Retold

“Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family rise, prosper and slowly fall apart.”

1901 · Retold

“In a dull provincial town, three sisters — Olga, Masha and Irina — dream of going back to Moscow, where they were happy as children. Over four years, as the army garrison comes and goes, their brother marries a woman who takes over their house, their loves come to nothing, and Moscow drifts further and further away.”

1904 · Retold

“Lyubov Ranevskaya comes home from Paris to her family estate, with its famous cherry orchard, to find it about to be sold for debt. A merchant, the son of her father's serfs, shows her how to save it — but she and her brother cannot bring themselves to act, and the orchard falls under the axe.”

1905 · Retold

“The 'fourth volume' of 'Capital': Marx's critical history of political economy from the Physiocrats to the vulgar economists of his own day. He follows his predecessors' attempts to explain where profit and rent come from — Quesnay's 'net product,' Adam Smith's two theories of value and his productive and unproductive labour, Ricardo's great achievement and its contradictions, Malthus's apology for the landlords — and the decay of the classical school into apologetics.”

1907 · Retold

“The young Hegel's unpublished manuscripts, written in Tübingen, Bern and Frankfurt in the 1790s: on what a true 'folk religion' would be; a life of Jesus as a teacher of pure moral reason; how Jesus' teaching hardened into an authoritarian, 'positive' religion; the spirit of Christianity as love overcoming law, and its fate; and a fragment on life and religion in which his later philosophy is first glimpsed.”

1908 · Retold

“A professor's daughter in Berkeley falls in love with a working-class revolutionary and watches, step by step, as the great trusts crush the middle class, buy off the unions, smash the socialists in Congress and drown a rising in Chicago in blood — the story of the coming of the Oligarchy, told in a manuscript found centuries later.”

1912 · Retold

“A famous, disciplined German writer, worn out by work, travels to Venice for a rest — and there, in a city secretly stricken by cholera, the iron self-control of a lifetime gives way, and he goes to his destruction.”

1913 · Retold

“A sickly, sensitive boy from a well-off Paris family grows up between two country walks, falls in love three times, enters high society and watches it decay — and discovers at last, through a taste of cake dipped in tea, how to recover the past and write the book we have been reading.”

1913 · Retold

“On a spring Sunday, a young merchant writes to an old friend in Russia to tell him of his engagement, and then goes to see his ageing father — who rises up in his bed and passes sentence on him.”

1915 · Retold

“A traveling salesman wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, and his family slowly learns to live without him.”

1920 · Retold

“The play that gave the world the word 'robot.' On a remote island, the factory of Rossum's Universal Robots turns out artificial workers by the hundred thousand, to free mankind from labour. Helena Glory comes to plead for their souls and stays to marry the general manager; ten years later the Robots rise against their makers, and only one man, who still works with his hands, is left alive to see whether life will go on.”

1920 · Retold

“Amory Blaine, handsome, vain and clever, passes through prep school, Princeton, the Great War and three love affairs, looking for something to believe in — Fitzgerald's first novel and the portrait of a new generation.”

1921 · Retold

“'Humbly report, sir, I'm an idiot.' Josef Švejk, a Prague dealer in mongrel dogs certified as feeble-minded, is swept into the First World War, and serves the Austrian Empire with such boundless zeal and literal-minded obedience that every order turns to chaos — from the pub where he is arrested on the day of Sarajevo, through asylums, gaols and the service of a drunken chaplain, to the train to the front, where he is taken prisoner by his own army.”

1922 · Retold

“Anthony Patch, heir to a reforming millionaire's fortune, and the dazzling Gloria Gilbert marry in New York before the First World War, and spend the next eight years waiting for the money — drinking, quarrelling and fading, as their youth runs out faster than their inheritance arrives.”

1923 · Retold

“Mikhail Platonov, a village schoolmaster who once promised great things, is brilliant, bitter and irresistible to women. Over one summer on a ruined country estate, he is pursued by a beautiful widow, by his first love — now a friend's wife — and by a young student, while his own wife watches; and his inability to choose ends in a pistol shot.”

1924 · Retold

“A young engineer from Hamburg goes up to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin for three weeks — and stays seven years, among the sick and the dying, the talkers and the lovers, until the First World War calls him down.”

1925 · Retold

“One June day in London in 1923: Clarissa Dalloway prepares for her party, her old love returns from India, and a shell-shocked young veteran she will never meet moves through the same streets toward his death.”

1925 · Retold

“In the summer of 1922 Nick Carraway rents a cottage on Long Island next to the mansion of the mysterious Jay Gatsby, who throws enormous parties for strangers and stares every night at a green light across the bay — the light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock.”

1925 · Retold

“On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, the bank official Josef K. is arrested by an invisible court for a crime no one will name — and spends a year trying, and failing, to find out what he is accused of.”

1926 · Retold

“A land surveyor called K. arrives in a snowbound village, summoned — he says — by the castle above it; but the castle will neither admit him nor send him away, and he spends his days trying to reach the official Klamm.”

1927 · Retold

“Sent away to America by his parents at sixteen, Karl Rossmann lands in New York, finds a rich uncle, loses him, and is passed from job to job and from one false friend to another across a strange, vast, half-imagined America.”

1927 · Retold

“On a September evening on the Isle of Skye, Mrs Ramsay promises her small son a trip to the lighthouse; ten years, a war and three deaths later, the trip is made, and a painter finishes her picture.”

1928 · Retold

“A mock biography of a young Elizabethan nobleman who lives for more than three hundred years, wakes one morning in Constantinople as a woman, and is still writing the same long poem in 1928.”

1931 · Retold

“A Chinese scholar who worked on the Great Wall as a young man reflects on why it was built in pieces, with gaps never closed, by a high command no one has seen — and on an empire so vast that its villages worship emperors long dead.”

1936 · Retold

“A Czech sea captain finds a colony of clever, upright newts in a bay off Sumatra and teaches them to kill sharks and fetch pearls. A Prague industrialist turns them into the cheapest labour force the world has ever seen. The newts learn to talk, read the evening papers, build harbours and continents, and multiply into billions, until one night a hoarse voice on the radio announces that they need more coastline, and the continents will have to make room.”

1952 · Retold

“In 1919, at thirty-six, Franz Kafka wrote a hundred-page letter to his father, Hermann, trying to explain why he was afraid of him — a portrait of a childhood, a family and a son, and an indictment that turns, again and again, into self-accusation.”

1952 · Retold

“In 1920, ill with tuberculosis in an Italian spa town, Franz Kafka began writing to his young Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, unhappily married in Vienna. For a few months they loved each other in letters; then Kafka's fear ended it. This is the story of that correspondence.”