Read Histoires extraordinaires in Frenchwith every sentence explained

Histoires extraordinaires by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1856. In Passage you read the full text in the French translation by Charles Baudelaire, marked advanced and filed under horror and mystery and crime. It runs to about 115,300 words.

A murder in a locked room. A buried pirate treasure. A whirlpool that swallows ships whole.

This is where the modern detective story was born. In "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter", the brilliant Auguste Dupin solves mysteries that leave the Paris police baffled. In "The Gold-Bug", a coded message leads to Captain Kidd's treasure, and in "A Descent into the Maelström" a fisherman lives through a nightmare at sea.

Edgar Allan Poe also takes you to the edge of science and madness: a balloon flight to the Moon, a man who keeps speaking after death, beautiful women who refuse to stay dead.

These are the tales that made Poe famous in France, in Charles Baudelaire's legendary translation, which reads like original French prose. Baudelaire's own passionate essays on Poe's life frame the collection.

Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in French. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:

• a natural translation of that exact sentence,
• a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
• the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
• all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.

It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate French book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.