Read Thus Spake Zarathustra by email.
Eighty speeches from a prophet with no god.
A hermit comes down from ten years on a mountain, and before he reaches the first town he has said to himself that God is dead — then spends eighty speeches working out what follows. Nietzsche wrote his strangest book as sermon, song and parable rather than argument, which is exactly why it goes down better one speech a morning than fifty pages a sitting.
Three or four minutes a day, and each installment stands alone.
Three months from now, you will have read Nietzsche.
94 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1883–1885
- Translation
- Common
- Installments
- 94
- Each installment
- 3–4 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 89,875
- Reading time
- 6 hours 14 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 2.5 months
- At 10 minutes a day
- 5 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 3 weeks
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Thus Spake Zarathustra?
Zarathustra is thirty when he goes up the mountain and forty when he comes down, and the Prologue alone has him address the sun, a marketplace crowd who would rather watch a tightrope walker, and the walker’s corpse, which he carries out of town to bury with his own hands. What follows is not an argument but a performance: eighty short speeches in the cadence of scripture — on reading and writing, war, friendship, chastity, the pale criminal, the thousand and one goals. It is where the Superman is preached, and where the thought that everything returns eternally is first put to Zarathustra as a riddle.
It is also the book people start and stop. Read in long sittings the speeches run together, the rhetoric flattens, and Part II reads like more of Part I; read one a morning, each is what it actually is — a short titled piece with a shape, an argument and usually a joke. The four Parts carry a loose story, and Part IV has a real one, a procession of strange guests turning up at the cave, but no morning depends on your having kept hold of the last. That is why there are no recaps.
We serialize Thomas Common’s translation in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, one discourse to an email wherever a discourse fits one: seventy-four of the eighty-one arrive whole. Only the seven longest are split, at paragraph breaks, across consecutive mornings — the Prologue into four, Old and New Tables into five, five others into two or three — and every piece is numbered where you will see it, “Part III · Old and New Tables · 2 of 5.”
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Thus Spake Zarathustra?
About six and a quarter hours straight through (89,875 words), which is how most people bounce off it. By email it’s 94 daily installments of 3–4 minutes, finished in about three months.
Is this a good first Nietzsche?
It’s the famous one, not the clear one. Zarathustra preaches, sings and mocks where Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals argue, so if you want the ideas stated plainly, start with the Genealogy and come back to this. If you want the book everyone quotes and few people finish, three months of mornings is how it gets finished.
Which translation is this?
Thomas Common’s, in the Standard Ebooks edition. It is deliberately biblical — thou, hath, spake — which suits a book built as scripture, and it renders Übermensch as “Superman” rather than the “overman” some modern translations prefer. The modern ones are livelier and all still in copyright.
Do the installments break mid-speech?
Rarely. Seventy-four of the eighty-one discourses arrive whole, one to an email. Only the seven longest are split — the Prologue over four mornings, Old and New Tables over five, and five others over two or three — and each part is numbered in the subject line, so you always know where you are. No recaps, because none are needed: every speech stands on its own.
How does it arrive?
One email a day at the hour you pick — morning, lunch, or evening. Free. Unsubscribe or pause from any installment.
Thomas Common translation, Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.