Salon: Annotated Classics

The classics, annotated.

Margin notes in every chapter.

Salon is a reader for 59 public-domain classics, printed the way a good edition is printed: with notes in the margin. Tap a numbered phrase and a note opens under the text. Each one is written for a reader at that point in the book, so nothing ahead of you is spoiled.

Pride and Prejudice, chapter 1, as it appears in Salon

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of¹ a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property² of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Bennet³,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

How it reads

Tap a numbered phrase: Every chapter has its own notes: a gloss for a word that has changed meaning, a line of context for a custom or a place, a reminder of who a character is.
Press and hold a paragraph: You get a short, plain explanation of what is happening in it, drawn from the chapter you are on and no further.
Keep a line: Kept lines go into your commonplace book on the Notes tab, filed under their book and chapter.
Just read: Full texts split into chapters, your place remembered in every book, light and dark pages. No account and no sign-in.

Reading is free

Every book and every chapter is free to read. Free readers get 15 notes and explanations a day. Premium removes the limit.

Notes and explanations are generated by AI. Notes are checked against the chapter text before they are shown, and explanations are drawn from the chapter you are on. They are a reading aid, not a scholarly edition. All texts are in the public domain in the United States.

The shelf

Fifty-nine books, from Homer to Virginia Woolf.

Meditations Marcus Aurelius, c. 170–180 CE
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen, 1813
Emma Jane Austen, 1815
Songs of Innocence and of Experience William Blake, 1794
Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë, 1847
Don Juan Lord Byron, 1819
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll, 1865
Don Quixote, Part I Miguel de Cervantes, 1605
The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1387–1400
The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov, 1904
Analects (compiled by disciples) Confucius, c. 400 BCE
Inferno Dante Alighieri, c. 1314
A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens, 1843
Great Expectations Charles Dickens, 1861
Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866
The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1880
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle, 1892
The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902
Middlemarch George Eliot, 1871–72
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
The Autobiography Benjamin Franklin, 1791
The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774
Faust, Part One Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808
Iliad Homer, c. 750 BCE
Odyssey Homer, c. 725 BCE
Les Misérables Victor Hugo, 1862
Rasselas Samuel Johnson, 1759
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce, 1916
Ulysses James Joyce, 1922
Endymion John Keats, 1818
Moby-Dick Herman Melville, 1851
Paradise Lost John Milton, 1667
Essays (posthumous edition) Michel de Montaigne, 1595
Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883–85
Beyond Good and Evil Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886
The Fall of the House of Usher Edgar Allan Poe, 1839
Swann's Way Marcel Proust, 1913
Eugene Onegin Alexander Pushkin, 1833
Masnavi Rumi, c. 1258–1273
Hamlet William Shakespeare, 1601
Macbeth William Shakespeare, 1606
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus Mary Shelley, 1818
The Art of War Sun Tzu, c. 450 BCE
Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift, 1726
Gitanjali Rabindranath Tagore, 1910
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy, 1869
Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy, 1877
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain, 1876
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain, 1884
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne, 1870
Around the World in Eighty Days Jules Verne, 1872
Aeneid Virgil, c. 29–19 BCE
Candide Voltaire, 1759
Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman, 1855
The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde, 1890
The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde, 1895
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792
Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf, 1925
The Wild Swans at Coole W. B. Yeats, 1919

The Sunday letter

One classic worth an evening and what its margin notes turned up. A short email each Sunday from Joey, who builds Salon.