Read Moby Dick in Englishwith every sentence explained

Moby Dick by Herman Melville was first published in 1851. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked intermediate and filed under historical fiction and thriller and suspense.

Call me Ishmael. With those words, a restless young man signs on for a voyage under a captain he has never met.

Broke and gloomy, Ishmael leaves Manhattan to find a berth on a whaler. At a crowded inn in New Bedford he is forced to share a bed with Queequeg, a tattooed harpooneer from a South Sea island, and to his own surprise the two strangers become the best of friends. Together they sign on to the Pequod, an old Nantucket ship that sails on a freezing Christmas Day.

For days the captain, Ahab, stays out of sight. When he finally stands on deck, balanced on a leg carved from a whale's jaw, he reveals the true purpose of the voyage: to hunt down Moby Dick, the white whale that took his leg, wherever it swims.

Funny, strange, learned and thunderous by turns, Melville's Moby Dick flopped when it appeared in 1851 and is now counted among the greatest American books ever written.

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.