Introducing: Ulysses

When our editors first sat down to condense Ulysses, the timeless masterpiece by James Joyce often considered one of the most important novels written in the English language, they immediately realized what an immense task trimming this book would be.  The first problem they encountered - none of them had read Ulysses, nor did they have the time to do so.

Recent studies suggest that 96 to 100 percent of people who claim they have read Ulysses are actually lying.  So with that in mind, Modern Illustrated Classics is proud to introduce Ulysses: The Vague Summary Edition.  We personally guarantee this handsomely bound volume will provide you with just enough information to bluff your way through any short conversation about Joyce's work without actually slogging through the damn thing.  Highlights include:

• Of course I've read Ulysses.
• Such an amazing book.  A real work of art.
• That ending? It completely blew my mind.
• Leopold Bloom was such a fascinating character.
• Pretty crazy that the US government actually burned copies of this book, huh?
• I definitely read this book.

Although only a few pages long, this edition captures exactly the thrill and joy of reading Ulysses - namely, telling other people you have read Ulysses.  Available soon at the finest retailers.

An Excerpt from Lord of the Rings: Bombadil's 16th Song

From our newest masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil Edition, we present one of Bombadil's most delightful and whimsical songs.  Feel free to sing along as you read!

As Bombadil took the Hobbits' dinner plates, he began to dance and sing another song, which went as follows: 

Tom’s a merry Bombadil,
His songs are full of laughter.
He sings them all the night and day
Through six or seven chapters.
Ring the dong a dally-o
Six or seven Chapters.

Plate 12: The Hobbits are once again filled with wonder and delight as Bombadil launches into another merry tune.

When the world was first begun,
Tom climbed a mountain top.
He started to sing his gayest songs
And it seems he hasn’t stopped.
Dong the bong the billy bob
It seems he can’t be stopped.

I’ll sing and dance a merry jig,
And prance around and shout,
And do a bunch of other stuff
That you don’t care about.
Hi the ho a dilly-o
You sure don’t care about.

But if you try to skip ahead,
My singing for to quell,
Just wait ‘till you see how many songs
They sing in Rivendell.
Dilly derpy dumpy-o
Just wait ‘till Rivendell.

From The Lord of the Rings, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By J.R.R. Tolkien et al.  Ill. by Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez.  Preorder your copy today!

From The Road: Plate 22

In one of The Road's most iconic scenes, the man and the boy discover some ash-covered apples by the side of the road.  Needless to say, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where the sun has not shone in over a decade, where no sign of life has yet appeared other than marauding cannibals, the sudden appearance of fresh, edible fruit does a lot to build the credibility of the setting.

Plate 22 - The man and the boy find an apple.  After all, why wouldn't they?

Its an apple, said the man
Yes, the boy said
We are sure living in a well thought out story that consistently makes sense, said the man
The boy didn't answer.

From The Road, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By Cormac McCarthy, et al.  Ill. by John One Tree. Preorder your copy today!

Introducing: The Lord of the Rings

Few works of fiction have left as deep a visual impression as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.  Some of the finest artists and filmmakers have taken Tolkien’s words and transformed them into indelible images.  But somehow, one of the most important and inspirational characters in The Lord of the Rings has been conspicuously absent from most previous adaptations of the work.

At Modern Illustrated Classics, we are taking a long overdue step to fix that oversight.  Introducing the new The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil Edition.

Yes, we have distilled Tolkien’s 6 book, thousand page masterpiece into its very core essence – a handful of pages where a tiny man wearing yellow shoes shouts mystical gibberish at trees. Features of this beautiful new edition include:

•           Tom Bombadil
•           Tom Bombadillo, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing
•           Bright blue jackets
•           And yellow boots
•           Ding dong the dally-o
•           So much unnecessary poetry
•           Guaranteed to contain no elements of plot.
•           Ho dilly dally dong
•           And more!

We hope you preorder The Lord of the Rings: The Tom Bombadil Edition, and also watch New Line Cinema’s 12-part film adaptation of this 50 page novel.

Flash Deal! Kurt Vonnegut Sale

This week only!  All Modern Illustrated Classics editions of Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat's Cradle now come with a joint and a box of condoms - for no extra charge! If you're not already the coolest kid in your high school class, a Kurt Vonnegut book will get you there, and now you'll be prepared for all the casual sex and drug use that your edgy intellectualism will bring.

Does this look like you? Then act now!

Just use promo code KILGORE TROUTFISHING and remember, question authority!

Introducing: The Go Set a Watchman Collection

If you love Southern literature and huge disappointments, we have no doubt that Go Set a Watchman already holds a special place in your heart.  The text - Harper Lee’s early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird - was initially rejected, then heavily edited to become the masterpiece we all know today.  But the publishers of Watchman were bold enough to ask: what if someone could pass off that crappy first draft as a sequel? Could they make tons of money? I bet so!

With this success story in mind, Modern Illustrated Classics would like to present the Go Set a Watchman collection.  Over a dozen failed drafts of classic works, each more embarrassing than the last.  We personally guarantee that each story will be 100 percent half-baked, and will ruin the way you think of at least one of your favorite literary characters.

The collection includes:

• Whatever the hell version of The Hobbit it was that Peter Jackson read.
• Milton’s original draft of Paradise Lost, where Satan is the most interesting character and totally wins in the end.
• That one script where Indiana Jones was a child molester
• Remember at the end of Grapes of Wrath when Tom Joad decides to spend his life fighting for the oppressed and downtrodden? Well in Steinbeck’s first draft, he just talks about how much he hates the Jews.
• A story where Dumbledore was actually Voldemort the whole time!
• Some Old Man and the Sea/Scarface crossover fanfic we found online.
• Actually that Milton thing might just be the original Paradise Lost. That was a weird book.
• And more!

We hope you will preorder a copy of the Go Set a Watchman collection, available wherever childhood heroes are destroyed for money.

From Moby Dick: Plate 37

Moby Dick is full of iconic images: from Ahab nailing a gold doubloon to the mast of the Pequod, to the climactic battle with the white whale.  We know you will be thrilled by the inimitable Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez's loving renditions of all of your favorite scenes.  But we have received dozens of letters from Melville fans with one burning question on their minds - what about that part where a guy wears a chopped-off whale penis around like a cloak?

Rest easy, literature fans.  We would never remove one of the most important dick jokes in American literature.

Plate 37 - The cassock of the Archbishoprick, is what Melville actually called this situation in his serious literary masterpiece

From Moby Dick, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By Herman Melville, et al.  Ill by Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez.  Preorder your copy today!

Introducing: The Road

The great Cormac McCarthy is one of America's most venerated living authors, and The Road is his masterpiece. It's the story of a man and his son trying to survive after global war destroyed all civilization, plants, animals, and quotation marks. The two have nothing but each other and a tiny glimmer of false hope. And of course, all the majesty of the dark, barren, ash-choked apocalyptic wasteland they call home comes to life with the help of our lavish, full-color illustrations.

Features of this beautiful new volume include:

• Even less punctuation.
• 45% more sparse and haunting.
• Some random untranslated Spanish, just to give you the real McCarthy experience.
• 30% more bleak.
• So many cans of peaches. A can of peaches on every page.
• Optional new, happier ending, where instead of finishing the book you just stop reading and go outside to have a picnic with your loved ones.

We hope you enjoy this wonderful addition to your Modern Illustrated Classics library, just as we hope Cormac McCarthy doesn't find out about this and murder us with a bolt gun.

An Excerpt from Moby Dick: On the Bigness of Whales

It took our editors a long time to shorten down a classic like Moby Dick, while still keeping the prose style as dense and unreadable as Melville fans demand.  We are pleased with our work, it goes without saying. Enjoy this selection from Chapter 384: On the Bigness of Whales.

Whales, as elsewhere noted, have foremost among their many qualities a characteristic which can only be called bigness.  This was accounted by even by the most ancient of seafaring peoples, whose conception of the bigness and smallness of diverse objects was not nearly so refined in degree as our modern sensibilities now permit.  In fact, the bigness of the whale is described in some detail by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History as "exceedingley bigge."

Plate 54: A sperm whale, with a little bitty Abraham Lincoln to demonstrate scale. Abraham Lincoln was a deal when this was written, right?

 Whales are bigger than any animal and most trees.  Their bigness exceeds even that of many buildings, tents, smallish boats, or rail cars.  In my travels, I saw many whales, and while some were bigger than others, all of them left me filled with an understanding, nay a glimpse, of the meaning of bigness.  Even a calf whale, not a few months old, is bigger than five barrels of pickles or a good-sized horse.  Even in smallness, their bigness is apparent.

 The bigness of the whale extends beyond the fish itself, however, into an infinite idea of bigness.  Any one whale can only offer a fleeting glimmer of this bigness beyond size, beyond weight.  The white whale’s bigness, and the bigger bignesses which lay beyond its white and twisted body, perhaps offered the seeds of the madness which plagued our Captain.

From Moby Dick, Modern Illustrated Classics Edition. By Herman Melville, et al.  Ill by Henry "Soupcan" Sanchez.  Preorder your copy today!

Introducing: Moby Dick

It's our goal at Modern Illustrated Classics to make big, difficult books accessible to even the most brain-addled millennial.  And where better to start than Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick.  This book, hailed by many as the Great American Novel, is a gripping story of whales, revenge, madness, and droning on about whales some more.  Our editorial team has carefully distilled this masterpiece to a mere one million pages (less than a tenth of its original length).

This handsomely bound and lavishly illustrated volume will feature:

• All the gay subtext you could hope for.
• Even more chapters, somehow.
• The parts where Melville argues that whales are fish, even though they breathe air with lungs and nurse their young with milk. And even though people had known those facts for, literally, over two thousand years.
• Pirates! Arr.
• Pictures of knots.
• Great parts to stop reading without even realizing it and just kind of zone out for a couple of minutes, until you forget what you've read and have to start the whole damn page over.
• There were pirates in this, right? Cause I'm pretty sure there are now.

While supplies last, each copy of this edition will come with a free ticket to Sea World, so you can experience the ocean's gentle giants being tortured in real life. Available wherever books are still being sold.