English · Intermediate
Read Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories in Englishwith every sentence explained
Oscar Wilde · 1891
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories by Oscar Wilde was first published in 1891. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under horror and mystery and crime. It runs to about 39,200 words.
A palm reader's terrible prophecy. A ghost who can't scare anyone. Oscar Wilde at his wittiest.
At a glittering London party, a fortune-teller reads the hand of the charming young Lord Arthur Savile, and turns pale. The lines say he will commit a murder. Lord Arthur is about to marry the lovely Sybil, and he is a man of duty: if he must kill someone, he decides, he had better get it done before the wedding.
In The Canterville Ghost, an American diplomat buys an old English mansion, complete with a famous ghost. But the practical Otis family is not frightened at all, and the poor ghost, after three hundred years of terrifying people, finds himself the victim of their jokes.
The collection also includes The Model Millionaire, The Sphinx Without a Secret and The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Full of sparkling dialogue and gentle satire, these stories are a perfect introduction to Wilde.
- Author
- Oscar Wilde
- First published
- 1891
- Language
- English
- Level
- Intermediate
- Genre
- Horror, Mystery and Crime
- Length
- About 39,200 words
How it opens
It was Lady Windermere’s last reception before Easter, and Bentinck House was even more crowded than usual. Six Cabinet Ministers had come on from the Speaker’s Levée in their stars and ribands, all the pretty women wore their smartest dresses, and at the end of the picture-gallery stood the Princess Sophia of Carlsrühe, a heavy Tartar-looking lady, with tiny black eyes and wonderful emeralds, talking bad French at the top of her voice, and laughing immoderately at everything that was said to her. It was certainly a wonderful medley of people.
Reading Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. 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 intermediate: comfortable once everyday English feels familiar, with the harder sentences one tap away. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
