A charming collection of bite-sized readings for the bookworm on the go.
Are you looking to join a book club, but short on time to read? This rich and diverse selection of unforgettable writing is carefully curated for a ten-minute hit of literary wonder. This is an anthology with a twist, featuring books that cover myriad periods, forms, and genres while also offering instantly appealing reading material on every emotion from joy to terror. It includes well-known writers such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Dickinson alongside early twentieth-century authors including E.M. Forster, James Joyce, and Willa Cather. You will also find writers from the Harlem Renaissance, the women’s rights movement of the early twentieth century, and from across the globe. Each excerpt is framed by a short analysis, getting to the heart of the short read, introducing the author, and suggesting further literary adventures. Perfect for the daily commute or as an inspirational gift for a curious reader, this book is a must-have of pure reading pleasure.
Table of Contents
2. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
3. Lord Byron, ‘Darkness’
4. George Eliot, Middlemarch
5. Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, ‘At Bay St. Louis’
6. Emily Brontë, ‘Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee’
7. William Wordsworth, The Prelude
8. Aphra Behn, The Rover
9. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
10. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
11. Margaret Oliphant, ‘The Library Window’
12. Christina Rossetti, ‘No, thank you, John’
13. William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
14. John Milton, Sonnet 19: ‘When I consider how my light is spent’
15. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
16. Frederick Douglass, ‘What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?’
17. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’
19. A.A. Milne, ‘Disobedience’
20. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
21. Langston Hughes, ‘Theme for English B’
22. Matthew Henson, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole
23. Hans Christian Andersen, ‘The Fir-Tree’
24. John Donne, ‘A Valediction: of Weeping’
25. Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Pied Beauty’
26. Emily Dickinson, ‘Dear March—come in—’
27. Dylan Thomas, ‘Fern Hill’
28. William Wordsworth, ‘To Sleep’ and W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, opening of ‘The Nightmare Song’ from Iolanthe
29. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Rhodora’
30. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and Robert Browning, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’
31. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
32. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Sonnet 29’ from Sonnets from the Portuguese
33. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, ‘The Revolt of “Mother”’
34. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt
35. Countee Cullen, ‘The Wise’
36. W.B. Yeats, ‘No Second Troy’
37. Emily Dickinson, ‘Tell All the Truth’
38. William Wordsworth, ‘Daffodils’
39. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
40. E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
41. Harindranath Chattopadhyay, ‘Noon’
42. John Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’
43. Georgia Douglas Johnson, ‘The Heart of a Woman’
44. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
45. Sarojini Naidu, ‘In the Bazaars of Hyderabad’
46. R L Stevenson, ‘The Lantern-Bearers’
47. Jessie Redmon Fauset, ‘La Vie C’est La Vie’
48. Edith Wharton ‘Mrs. Manstey’s View’
49. William Blake, ‘London’
50. Vernon Lee, ‘The Doll’
51. Charlotte Smith, ‘On Being Cautioned Against Walking on a Headland Overlooking the Sea, Because it was Frequented by a Lunatic’
52. Otto Leland Bohanon, ‘Villanelle’
53. Yone Noguchi, ‘To a Sparrow’
54. Charlotte Mew, ‘The Farmer’s Bride’
55. Emily Dickinson, ‘The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants’
56. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Merlin and Vivien’
57. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Happy Prince’
58. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
59. Joseph S Cotter, Jr, ‘Rain Music’
60. Amy Lowell, ‘The Emperor’s Garden’
61. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
62. George Horton Moses, ‘Weep’
63. Karel and Josef Capek, R.U.R.
64. Claude McKay, ‘Subway Wind’
65. Djuna Barnes, ‘A Night Among the Horses’
66. Jean Toomer, Cane
67. Constance Naden, ‘The Astronomer’
68. Kate Chopin, The Awakening
69. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
70. Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain
71. Willa Cather, My Ántonia
72. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
73. James Joyce, Ulysses
74. E. Pauline Johnson, ‘Joe’
75. ‘Riddle 57’ from the Exeter Book
76. L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
77. Willis Richardson, ‘The After Thought’
78. Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe
79. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
80. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House
81. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince
82. Sojourner Truth, Speech given at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio
83. Wilfred Owen, ‘Arms and the Boy’
84. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’
85. Charles Dickens, ‘A Christmas Carol’
86. Jane Austen, Persuasion
87. Phillis Wheatley Peters, ’A Hymn to the Evening’
88. Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
89. William Stanley Braithwaite, ‘Rhapsody’
90. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat