So, after finishing my first Agatha Christie novel, reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, I found myself thinking about something I had somehow overlooked for years:

The public domain is full of genuinely good stories. Not “important” stories that people pretend to enjoy, not books that are only discussed in literature classrooms. 

Actual stories.

Entertaining stories.

Funny stories.

Strange stories.

Stories that have survived for generations because they are, quite simply, good.

And perhaps the most surprising part is that many of them are freely available. No ebook purchases, no growing pile of unread books on my phone, no additional shelves required in my already crowded home. Just stories waiting to be read.

I came to reading through Urdu. I read whatever I could get my hands on, and while that journey introduced me to many wonderful books, it also left some curious gaps. Some of the classics that people assume everyone has read, I simply hadn’t.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Hans Christian Andersen.

Many fairy tales.

Even stories as famous as Cinderella and Rapunzel.

Not the original versions, not even the abridged versions in many cases. 

If you’re wondering whether I was living under a rock, the answer is: perhaps.

But that’s the fun part.

Discovering these stories as an adult feels a little like finding a hidden room in a house you’ve lived in for years. And now feels like the right time to do something with that discovery.

One thing I quickly noticed is that while many of these works are freely available in English, finding accessible Urdu translations isn’t always straightforward. Perhaps they already exist and I simply haven’t looked hard enough, perhaps some are out of print, perhaps some don’t have any translation at all.

Whatever the reason, I’d like to experiment.

Over the coming weeks and months, I plan to pick works from the public domain, read them, write about them, and where appropriate, translate and share them in Urdu, little by little. Not as a replacement for the original. Nah. The goal isn’t to keep readers away from Poe, Andersen, Doyle, Twain, Wilde, Austen, or any of the other giants whose works have survived the test of time. The goal is to provide a doorway. 

A first encounter.

A nudge.

A reason to discover a story you might otherwise never have picked up.

And if that introduction encourages someone to read the original work afterwards, then the project will have done exactly what it was supposed to do.

One final note: copyright matters. Any works selected for translation or publication will be chosen from material that is firmly in the public domain and free to share. The purpose of this project is to celebrate literary history, not to ignore intellectual property rights.

For now, I’m simply excited. A few days ago I thought I was looking for my next book. Instead, I seem to have discovered an entire library.