The great books,
in the English you
actually speak.

A note from the publisher.

We believe the great books belong to their readers. Not to scholars, not to specialists, not to the lucky few taught them well. To anyone willing to pick one up.

For most of the books we call classics, this is no longer true. A novel from a hundred years ago often reads like a foreign language. A play from four hundred years ago reads like code. You pick up a book you have been told is essential, find you cannot follow the sentences, and close it, blaming yourself.

The failure is not yours.

It is in the distance between the book and the reader. We exist to close it. Each Lucid Classics edition is a fresh translation into the clear contemporary English you actually speak — whether the source is Greek, Russian, or the English of six centuries ago.

Only the language changes. The arguments, attitudes, jokes, offenses, and difficulty of the original all remain. A hard book stays hard in the ways the author meant it to be hard.

There is no virtue in struggling through obsolete language. The struggle is not the point. The book is the point.