Synopses & Reviews
Reductio ad absurdum!
70 Epic tales and heroic myths, dense theories and windy texts, oral traditions and really long novels-all reduced to 34 minutes reading.
Learn Mill's Principles of Political Economy in couplets, Darwin's Origin of Species as a chant. Read Jane Eyre in 30 lines, Beowulf in 26, The Canterbury Tales in 21. Discover Melville's Moby Dick in 8 lines of verse, fully footnoted. Catch up on Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in a record 3-stanza report.
Plus many more that are less-70 ShrinkLits in all.
Full-color illustrations throughout.
Synopsis
Seventy of the world's greatest literary masterpieces are summarized in light verse.
Synopsis
From Antigone to Lolita, from Beowulf to The Hobbit. The world's greatest literature is summarized in Maurice Sagoff's hilarious light verse. The result-70 intoxicating distillations of the classics everyone has been taking far too seriously for far too long. Selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club and a New York Times Best Seller. 180,000 copies in print.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Preface ShrinkLit: Elements of Style
William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White
Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe
The Courtship of Miles Standish
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Beowulf
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Robert Browning
Babbit
Sinclair Lewis
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Around the World in Eighty Days
Jules Verne
Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
Inferno
Dante Alighieri
Antigone
Sophocles
King Lear
William Shakespeare
Silas Marner
George Eliot
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Rip Van Winkle
Washington Irving
Lady Chatterley's Lover
D.H. Lawrence
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
Common Sense
Thomas Paine
Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars
Caius Julius Caesar
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemmingway
Cyrano de Bergerac
Edmond Rostand
The Song of Hiawatha
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Thomas Gray
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen
Evangeline
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Hobbit (two versions)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
The Self-Help Books
Portnoy's Complaint
Phillip Roth
The Joy of Sex
Alex Comfort
Lysistrata
Aristophanes
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (The Kinsey Report)
Alfred C. Kinsey and others
Critique of Pure Reason
Immanuel Kant
Alice in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
The Shih Ching
Kung-Tzu (Confucius)
The Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan
Candide
Voltaire
The Raven
Edgar Allen Poe
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder
The Deserted Village
Oliver Goldsmith
On Thermonuclear War
Herman Kahn
The Compleat Angler
Izaak Walton
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
Small is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher
Sappho
Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (The "Little Red Book")
Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy
Moby Dick or the White Whale
Herman Melville
The Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
Listen to the Warm
Rod McKuen
The Book of Lists
David Wallechinsky, Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Principles of Political Economy
John Stuart Mill
Call of the Wild
Jack London
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (1-17)
The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (18-154)