The Essential Paradise Lost (2017). In a bid to win readers back to Milton, John Carey's shortened version of the epic selects the greatest passages of poetry. and intersperses them with prose paraphrases of the passages he omits, so that the structure and coherence of the whole story are preserved. His notes and commentary are designed to make the poem accessible to the contemporary reader. The result is one third of the length of the original. On word-count it is slightly shorter than George Orwell's novella, Animal Farm.
"Heavily pruned but with the best bits left in, this new version of Milton's masterpiece will bring readers back." (Review: Colin Burrow 19 March 2017)
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