About

Plus One Reader is a small independent series of graded readers, published on Amazon KDP and supported by free companion material on this site.

Why classic stories

Purpose-written beginner texts have a problem: nobody wants to reread them. A Chekhov story is worth finishing whether or not you are learning Russian, and that changes what happens on the fourth evening, when the novelty of studying has worn off and only the story is keeping you in the chair.

The stories in these volumes are the ones that native readers meet at school and remember afterwards. They are also, conveniently, short, plot-driven, and out of copyright.

How a story is chosen

• It has to work at length the reader can finish in one sitting.
• It has to turn on something — a revelation, a reversal, a joke — that survives being simplified.
• It has to be in the public domain in its original language.
• Across a volume, the ten stories have to cover enough different registers and settings that the vocabulary does not collapse into one narrow field.

How an adaptation is written

Each story is rewritten against a frequency list for its target level, then checked by a native speaker of the language, then read back against the original to confirm that the meaning, the ending and the tone are intact. The footnotes, the glossary and the exercises are written last, from the finished text rather than from the original — otherwise they gloss words that are no longer there.

Getting in touch

Corrections are genuinely welcome: a graded text is a set of judgement calls, and some of them are wrong. If you find a mistake, an unnatural sentence, or an exercise with two defensible answers, tell us and it goes into the next revision.