About Classics Retold
There are books that shaped the way the world thinks — novels and poems that defined entire centuries, that gave names to the human feelings we still can’t shake. Dostoevsky on guilt. Zweig on exile. Dumas on loyalty. Dante on the long road back from darkness.
Most of these books are still in print. Very few people are reading them.
The reason isn’t laziness. It’s translation. The editions most people encounter — the ones assigned in school, the ones still filling library shelves — were translated in the nineteenth century, or the early twentieth. The English is archaic, stiff, often impenetrable. The original electricity is gone. Readers give up three chapters in, conclude the classics aren’t for them, and miss everything.
Classics Retold exists to fix that problem.
What We Do
We publish modern English translations of the great works of French, Russian, German, and English literature — translations that honor the author’s voice while reading the way literature should read in the twenty-first century. Fast. Alive. Immediate.
On this blog, we write about the books themselves and the people who wrote them. Who was Stefan Zweig, and why did the most celebrated author in Europe choose to disappear? What did Dostoevsky mean to tell us about a world that has no use for goodness? Why did Dumas write so much, so fast, and why does nearly all of it still work?
Our aim is to make the case, book by book, that the classics aren’t a duty. They’re the best stories ever written. They just needed better translations.
Affiliate Disclosure
Classics Retold is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. When you click a link to Amazon on this site and make a purchase, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend editions we believe are genuinely the best way to read a given work.
Classics Retold 