ShrinkLits : Seventy of the World's Towering Classics Cut down to Size

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.

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)