First texts in English

For students learning English: short texts from the reader, from the shortest to the longest, to read in full. The texts are in English; each work is introduced in one sentence in English.

In the reader, the “Aa” settings enlarge the text and the space between lines; you can also highlight words to look up and add a note.

• In Flanders Fields

  John McCrae · In Flanders Fields · Canada, 1915

  A fifteen-line rondeau written at the front, in which the dead of a battle in Flanders speak to those who remain.

  97 words
• The Lamb

  William Blake · Songs of Innocence and of Experience · England, 1794

  Songs of childhood, then their reverse: the lamb first, the tiger afterwards.

  113 words
• Ozymandias

  Percy Bysshe Shelley · Ozymandias · England, 1818

  Two legs of stone standing in the sand, and at their feet a shattered face.

  114 words
• Preface

  Jerome K. Jerome · Three Men in a Boat · England, 1889

  Three friends set out on the river to cure imaginary ailments, with a dog.

  173 words
• The Weary Blues

  Langston Hughes · The Weary Blues · United States, 1926

  Harlem is then giving itself a literature and debating the image of itself that it wants to show. This collection brings the clubs, the blues and the language spoken there into poetry.

  235 words
• The Preface

  Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray · Ireland, 1890

  A wish made before a canvas, and a painted mouth that is no longer quite the same.

  381 words
• Our First Harvest

  Steele Rudd · On Our Selection · Australia, 1899

  A family clears a piece of land that yields nothing, and every disaster there is told as a farce.

  883 words
• The Author’s Account of Himself

  Washington Irving · The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. · United States, 1819

  An American looks at old England, and slips two American legends in among his sketches.

  1019 words
• Paper Pills

  Sherwood Anderson · Winesburg, Ohio · United States, 1919

  These stories make a Middle Western town into a collection of solitudes, in which each person stays shut up inside the truth he has chosen.

  1262 words
• Chapter One, I Remember, I Remember

  Miles Franklin · My Brilliant Career · Australia, 1901

  A penniless girl from the bush wants to write, in a time and a country that have no use for it.

  1284 words
• Down the Rabbit-Hole

  Lewis Carroll · Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · England, 1865

  A little girl follows a white rabbit underground and meets creatures that talk, reason and quarrel.

  2144 words

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