Classic Stories Summarized Podcast
1) (10 min summary) King Lear
Send us a text King Lear is one of William Shakespeare's greatest tragedies, believed to have been written between 1605 and 1606 and first performed shortly thereafter. Drawing from the ancient legend...Show More
2) (8 min summary) The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Send us a text John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come, a profound Christian allegory written in the form of a dream vision, was composed primarily during the au...Show More
3) (9 min summary) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Send us a text Charles Dickens wrote and published A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas in December 1843, completing the manuscript in just six weeks. Prompted by urgent financ...Show More
4) (9 min summary) Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Send us a text Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818 when the author was only nineteen, emerged from a famous ghost-story challenge issued during a rainy summ...Show More
5) (6 min summary) Candide by Voltaire
Send us a text Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759) is a satirical novella by the French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, written in response to the devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and the optimist...Show More
6) (summary) Animal Farm by George Orwell
Send us a text Animal Farm, published in 1945 by George Orwell, is a satirical novella that serves as an allegorical critique of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent rise of Stalinism, us...Show More
7) Utopia, by Thomas Moore
Send us a text Thomas More’s Utopia, published in Latin in 1516, emerged from the intellectual ferment of Renaissance humanism and More’s own complex life as a lawyer, scholar, and eventual Lord Chanc...Show More
8) The Phaedo by Plato
Send us a text The Phaedo is one of Plato's Socratic dialogues, written around 360 BCE, which recounts the final hours of the philosopher Socrates before his execution by hemlock poisoning in Athens i...Show More
9) The Book of Revelation
Send us a text The Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, was written by the apostle John, traditionally identified as John the Evangelist, around 95-96 AD while he was exiled on the...Show More
10) The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Send us a text The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), published in 1924 by German author Thomas Mann, is a landmark novel of modernist literature, set in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium in the years bef...Show More