Abridged Classics

Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn't

John Atkinson

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062747860
• Print ISBN:
  9780062747853

A collection of irreverent summations of more than one hundred well-known works of literature, accompanied with funny color illustrations.

From Anna Karenina to Wuthering Heights, Abridged Classics: Brief Summaries of Books You Were Supposed to Read but Probably Didn't is packed with dozens of humorous super-condensed summations—cleverly described in the fewest words possible—of some of the most famous works of literature by many of the world's most revered authors.

From "Old ladies convince a guy to ruin Scotland" ( Macbeth) to "Everyone is sad. It snows." ( War and Peace), these clever, humorous synopses of stories by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, J. R. R. Tolkien, Margaret Atwood, James Joyce, Plato, Ernest Hemingway, Dan Brown, Ayn Rand, Herman Melville, and more are sure to make book lovers smile.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Ulysses
• Moby Dick
• War and Peace
• Beowulf
• Oliver Twist
• Walden
• Macbeth
• Brave New World
• In Search of Lost Time
• The Sun also Rises
• Naked Lunch
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Brothers Karamazov
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Faerie Queen
• Animal Farm
• Pride and Prejudice
• The Odyssey
• The Iliad
• Don Quixote
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• Heart of Darkness
• The Republic
• Wuthering Heights
• Robinson Crusoe
• The Pearl
• The Grapes of Wrath
• A Farewell to Arms
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Othello
• On the Road
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Divine Comedy: Inferno
• Peter Pan
• Treasure Island
• Frankenstein
• Gulliver’s Travels
• 1984
• Great Expectations
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• The Aeneid
• The Return of the Native
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Trial
• Emma
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
• The Great Gatsby
• King Lear
• Ivanov
• The Crucible
• Ethan Frome
• Anna Karenina
• Jane Eyre
• Twelfth Night
• The Da Vinci Code
• Romeo and Juliet
• The Mysteries of Udolpho
• The Scarlet Letter
• Little Women
• The Pilgrim’s Progress
• Madame Bovary
• The Stranger
• To the Lighthouse
• The Metamorphosis
• Waiting for Godot
• Hamlet
• Of Mice and Men
• Lolita
• The Fountainhead
• Oedipus Rex
• The Handmaid’s Tale
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Richard III
• Paradise Lost
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• The Waste Land
• The Red Badge of Courage
• Tarzan of the Apes
• The Bell Jar
• Moll Flanders
• The Three Musketeers
• Charlotte’s Web
• Julius Caesar
• Candide
• The Prince
• The Jungle Book
• The Raven
• Lord of the Flies
• Anne of Green Gables
• The Old Man and the Sea
• Tom Jones
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Fahrenheit 451
• Tropic of Cancer
• Life of Pi
• The Bible
• Acknowledgments
• Index by Book
• Index by Author
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher