Yeah, that one. There was one more left in the series. And it was, we humbly think, the best of the bunch, so we aptly saved it for last: book blogger extraordinaire Maud Newton summarizes the classic novel Crime and Punishment in 60 seconds.

Because we thought the challenge wasn’t hard enough, we asked filmmaker Adam to summarize the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy in one minute.

John Irving’s The World According to Garp summarized in 60 seconds. Watch it!

The latest in our “classic novels in 60 seconds” series. Enjoy!

Just in time for Valentine’s Day.

[Earlier: The Great Gatsby retold in 60 seconds]

Remember this from a few months back?

For the last few months, we’ve been working hard with the good folks over at Anthology Media to put together a spiffy new web video series for you. The concept is pretty simple: we get writers, musicians, actors, and other creative types to summarize their favorite novels. In 60 seconds or less. With no time to prepare.

One of most the interesting aspects we found about this project was how it reflected the sorts of things people take away from fiction. We had each participant summarize a couple of stories, and everyone seemed to have a theme. Carolina, who you’ll see in a few weeks, managed to end each of her 60-second summaries with the concept of love. Morgan somehow related everything back to prostitutes and redemption. Other themes? Dinosaurs and aliens. This was all the more interesting when the stories in question contained neither dinosaurs nor aliens.

We’re kicking off the project with Matt Mazur, a NYC-based folk and comedy musician. He composed this little diddly about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby off the top of his head. Enjoy and, if you like it, please share:

And by “top-secret project,” I mean “project about which I continually drop annoyingly vague hints.” Stay tuned.