Read Heart of Darkness by email.
The Company has a brilliant man upriver. Go and see what became of him.
A steamer captain is sent up an unnamed African river to find Kurtz, the Company's most brilliant agent — and the further he goes, the less the wilderness explains and the more the Company does. Conrad's short, hallucinatory masterpiece, told in one sitting on a yacht at dusk.
Two or three minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Eight weeks from now, you will have read Conrad.
57 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1899
- Installments
- 57
- Each installment
- 2–3 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 37,999
- Reading time
- 2 hours 38 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 5 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 2 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 8 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Heart of Darkness?
Four men wait for the tide on a yawl in the Thames estuary, and one of them — Marlow, cross-legged, looking like an idol — starts talking. What follows is the most influential long story in English: a riverboat captain's journey to the Company's Inner Station, past chained men and objectless blasting and a Frenchman shelling a continent, toward an agent named Kurtz of whom everyone speaks and no one will say anything plain.
Conrad had made the journey himself — he captained a Congo river steamer in 1890, and what he saw there ended his career at sea and nearly ended him. The novella he wrote nine years later is dense, sardonic, and unsparing about what the 'noble cause' of empire looked like at the point of application. Chinua Achebe's famous attack on the book and the decades of argument that followed are part of its history now; the argument only exists because the book refuses to settle.
It is also, sentence for sentence, one of the great feats of English prose — written by a Pole who learned the language in his twenties. Conrad published it as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine in three parts, and its long unbroken movements are where a daily serialization earns its keep: a few minutes of the river every morning, the Inner Station always a little further on.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Heart of Darkness?
About two and a half hours straight through (37,999 words). By email, it's 57 daily installments of two to three minutes — about two months, or faster at a premium pace of two or three installments a day.
Is it really all one story told aloud?
Yes — Conrad published it in three long parts with no chapters, and nearly all of it is Marlow talking through a single evening on a yacht at anchor. The daily installments are cut inside those three movements, with a one-line recap each morning so the thread never drops.
Isn't this book controversial?
It has been argued over for a century — most famously by Chinua Achebe, who called it racist, and by its many defenders who read it as an indictment of empire. The text is presented as Conrad published it in 1899, period language included, and the argument is part of why it is still read.
Do I need any background to enjoy it?
None. It's a sailor's yarn: a man wants a boat, gets one, and goes up a river to fetch someone. Everything else the book does, it does to you on the way.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
No. Each recap covers only the previous installment. What Marlow finds at the Inner Station stays unspoken until he finds it.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous installment at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.