Happy New Year of Free Books!
On 1 January 2025, thousands of works from 1929 entered the public domain in the US. Here are just a few of the riches you can enjoy in a bumper year of free great reads
This week, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain published a newsletter celebrating ‘Public Domain Day 2025’—here are some of the delights they included, and that we can now read for free, from Virginia Woolf through Agatha Christie. You can read the full announcement here. The LitHits archive itself is a rich treasury of over 150 free short reads drawn almost entirely from the public domain. Enjoy!
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
We featured this brilliant work in 2023—here’s the link to our newsletter
A Room of One's Own
To the right and left bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat throug…
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Mahatma Gandhi, The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story
Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery
Arthur Wesley Wheen, the first English translation of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Curator’s Corner
Thanks to Kevin Delaney for inspiration for this week’s newsletter (and for being a great friend of LitHits generally!).
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