About this edition

The 1000 Nights Reading Program is a simple idea, credited to Ray Bradbury’s advice to young writers: read one short story, one poem, and one essay every night. Do it for a thousand nights and you will never be the same reader — or the same writer — again.

This site is the program’s companion: the full text of all 3,000 works, one night at a time, with tools to track your journey day by day.

Everything is public domain

Every story, poem, and essay here is in the public domain, which is why this site can exist at all. Where the original work wasn’t in English, the site uses public-domain translations — some over a century old (Constance Garnett’s Gogol, W. G. Aston’s Japanese classics) — and a few fresh translations made for this archive where no public-domain translation existed. Translators are credited on every work; fresh translations are always labeled as such.

An honestly built collection

The reading list this is based on contained hundreds of wrong links and a number of repeated and copyrighted works. Each was corrected, replaced with a public-domain work in the same spirit, or recovered from scans of century-old books — and every change was logged. Nothing here is presented as other than what it is.

Support literacy

If this project gets you reading, consider passing it on: Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library mails free books to children around the world.