In the Library
Rip Van Winkle
Washington Irving, 1819
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 30 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 7k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Whoever has made a voyage up the Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Household Tales
Brothers Grimm
Irving borrowed Rip from a German folk tale, and the Grimms gathered that same forest of enchanted sleep, Briar Rose's hundred years behind the thorns included.
£1.99
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa also wakes to find his life utterly transformed overnight, but Kafka turns Rip's comic bewilderment into airless horror and a family's slow cruelty.
£1.99
The Time Machine
H.G. Wells
Wells sends his traveller forward through time to a world he cannot recognize, chasing the same vertigo of lost decades but reaching for cosmic dread instead of village comedy.
£1.99
About the book
High in the Kaatskills, a good-natured idler who would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound climbs away from his scolding wife, meets a silent stranger in old Dutch clothes rolling a keg uphill, and drinks from a flagon passed by ghostly ninepin players. Then he sleeps. When Rip Van Winkle wakes, his beard is a foot long, his gun furred with rust, and the twenty years he missed have swallowed a whole world: King George's face on the inn sign has become General Washington's, and a colony has become a republic. Washington Irving wrote the first great American short story as a joke that turns, without warning, into an ache. What Rip loses is not just his youth but the small vanished country he belonged to. Few tales this funny leave you this haunted by how quietly a life can slip its moorings while a man is only trying to be left alone.