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The world’s landmark books, essays, and speeches, each distilled into the same 30-second format, so one screenshot carries the whole idea. A new one published every day.

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Classics

Classics

The Damned Thing

Ambrose Bierce · short story, 1893

A frontier inquest tries to explain a mauling death, but the surviving witness insists the killer was a color the human eye cannot register.

15 min50 sec8 Sept
Classics

The Piazza Tales

Herman Melville · short story collection, 1856

Six stories bound by one nerve: a scrivener who stops complying, a slave ship whose captain isn't the one in charge, and a bell-maker crushed by the machine he built to replace him.

6 hrs50 sec7 Sept
Classics

The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories

Kate Chopin · novella and short stories, 1899

A married woman at a Gulf Coast resort learns to swim, takes a lover, and decides she would rather drown than keep belonging to anyone.

5 hrs50 sec6 Sept
Classics

Mosses from an Old Manse

Nathaniel Hawthorne · short story collection, 1846

Hawthorne moves into a haunted-feeling Concord parsonage and fills it with twenty-five tales where science, faith, and craftsmanship all curdle into ruin.

12 hrs50 sec5 Sept
Classics

The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories

Anton Chekhov · short story collection, 1917

A married bank clerk starts a Yalta fling to kill time and ends up trapped in the first real love of his life, with no idea how to live it.

5 hrs50 sec4 Sept
Classics

Complete Original Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant · short story collection, 1903

The complete Maupassant story cycle opens with a prostitute saving a coach full of respectable French citizens from the Prussians, and closes with those same citizens eating in front of her while she starves and weeps.

37 hrs50 sec3 Sept
Classics

Whirligigs

O. Henry · short story collection, 1910

A killer on the run, a kidnapped boy who refuses to leave, and a five-dollar divorce: twenty-four O. Henry stories bound by one rule, life spins on you the moment you think you have it figured out.

6 hrs50 sec2 Sept
Classics

The £1,000,000 Bank-Note, and Other New Stories

Mark Twain · short story collection, 1893

A broke American is handed an uncashable million-pound note as a rich man's bet and discovers that just carrying it, never spending it, is enough to buy him an entire life.

5 hrs50 sec1 Sept
Classics

The Masque of the Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe · short story, 1842

A prince locks a thousand nobles inside a walled abbey to outrun a plague, and the plague walks in anyway, dressed for the party.

11 min50 sec31 Aug
Classics

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes · novel, 1605

A minor nobleman reads himself insane on chivalry romances, then rides out as a knight-errant to fight giants that turn out to be windmills.

32 hrs50 sec30 Aug
Classics

Dead Souls

Nikolai Gogol · novel, 1842

A con man tours provincial Russia buying the legal identities of dead serfs off landowners who can't quite believe what they're being asked, and the scheme works because everyone around him is running a smaller version of the same fraud.

11 hrs50 sec29 Aug
Classics

Fathers and Sons

Ivan Turgenev · novel, 1862

A nihilist doctor arrives to tear down every inherited belief in a Russian household, then dies from the one thing his science could not out-argue: a stray infection.

6 hrs50 sec28 Aug
Classics

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Henry Fielding · novel, 1749

A foundling of unknown parentage is raised by a rich squire, disowned for his sins, and nearly destroyed by the belief he slept with his own mother, before a lawyer's confession clears him of everything but bad luck.

27 hrs50 sec27 Aug
Classics

Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift · novel, 1726

A ship's surgeon washes up among six-inch people, then giants, then flying scientists, then talking horses, and each stop makes him hate his own species a little more.

8 hrs50 sec26 Aug
Classics

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe · novel, 1719

A shipwrecked Englishman spends twenty-eight years alone on an island, and the book is less about survival than about the account he keeps of it.

9 hrs50 sec25 Aug
Classics

Kidnapped

Robert Louis Stevenson · novel, 1886

A teenage heir is sold into slavery by his own uncle, survives a shipwreck and a gun battle, then witnesses a real-life political assassination that puts a price on his head too.

6 hrs50 sec24 Aug
Classics

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins · novel, 1859

A stranger in white stops Walter Hartright on a midnight road, and her resemblance to an heiress becomes the hinge of a plot to fake one woman's death and steal the other's identity.

19 hrs50 sec23 Aug
Classics

The Moonstone

Wilkie Collins · novel, 1868

A cursed yellow diamond disappears from a locked drawer on a country estate, and the detective solves it by drugging the prime suspect a second time to make him relive the crime.

15 hrs50 sec22 Aug
Classics

Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray · novel, 1848

A penniless schemer claws her way through English high society while her sweet, passive best friend gets used by everyone around her, and Thackeray refuses to give either of them a hero to marry.

24 hrs50 sec21 Aug
Classics

Middlemarch

George Eliot · novel, 1871

A young idealist marries a dessicated scholar hoping to matter, and Eliot spends eight hundred pages showing how little any one life actually gets to choose.

25 hrs50 sec20 Aug
Classics

Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy · novel, 1874

A shepherd bankrupted by his own sheepdog spends years watching the woman he loves fall for a soldier's sword tricks and a landowner's obsession before both rivals destroy each other and she comes back to him.

11 hrs50 sec19 Aug
Classics

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy · novel, 1891

A dairymaid descended from fallen nobility is ruined twice over, once by the man who wrongs her and once by the one who cannot forgive her for it.

12 hrs50 sec18 Aug
Classics

Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad · novel, 1900

A ship's officer abandons eight hundred pilgrims to a boat he believes is sinking, then spends the rest of his life trying to out-run the one second he failed himself.

10 hrs50 sec17 Aug
Classics

The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · novel, 1906

Sinclair set out to indict wage slavery in the Chicago stockyards and instead triggered a meat-inspection law, because readers cared more about what was in the sausage than about the men grinding it.

11 hrs50 sec16 Aug
Classics

Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser · novel, 1900

A country girl trades poverty for a rich man's money, a rich man's money for stardom, and stardom for an empty rocking chair by the window.

12 hrs50 sec15 Aug
Classics

My Ántonia

Willa Cather · novel, 1918

A lawyer spends a lifetime failing to forget the Bohemian immigrant girl who taught him what the Nebraska prairie actually meant.

6 hrs50 sec14 Aug
Classics

Washington Square

Henry James · novella, 1880

A rich, plain, unremarkable young woman falls for a handsome fortune hunter, and her father spends the rest of the book trying to prove he is right about it.

5 hrs50 sec13 Aug
Classics

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton · novel, 1905

A beautiful, broke socialite spends a decade calculating the perfect marriage and loses everything one honest choice at a time.

10 hrs50 sec12 Aug
Classics

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton · novel, 1920

A New York lawyer engaged to the perfect society bride falls for her disgraced, separated cousin, and learns the family customs he thought would protect him are the trap.

8 hrs50 sec11 Aug
Classics

The Prisoner of Zenda

Anthony Hope · novel, 1894

An idle English gentleman who happens to share a king's face gets drugged royalty, a kidnapped monarch, and a throne he was never supposed to sit on.

4 hrs50 sec10 Aug

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