'The one true thing I will tell you is that I am lying.' A voyage to the Moon, written in the second century AD.
Press this book. Your gift commissions the Great Library’s word-by-word interlinear A True Story — and the day it is made, it is free for everyone, forever. You are not buying a copy; you are paying for it to exist.
Give what you like — a few dollars helps, or fund the whole of Book I · the opening and become its Founder. Every contribution presses it closer to real.
This is how every Great Library book reads, word beneath word. A True Story’s own first lines appear here the day its pilot is pressed.
A parody of every traveller's tale Lucian had ever read. A whirlwind carries his ship to the Moon, where King Endymion is at war with the Sun over who gets to colonise the Morning Star. Later the whole crew is swallowed by a whale 1,500 stades long and lives inside it for a year and eight months. It is often called the first science fiction. We are pressing it now; it isn't readable here yet, and your gift helps it along.
Lucian was born around AD 125 in Samosata on the Euphrates, in Roman Syria, and learned the Greek he wrote so well as a young man. A True Story dates from the 160s or 170s. On the Isles of the Blessed, his narrator meets Homer and asks where he was really born. Homer says Babylon, and that his real name was Tigranes.
The last line promises that the adventures will continue in the following books. There are no following books, and the promise is his final lie. Lucian writes a clean, plain Attic Greek, which makes him one of the easiest ancient authors to read in the original, and the joke only works if you catch his deadpan.
Making an interlinear A True Story is real work — freezing a scholarly source text, aligning every word to its dictionary form, glossing what resists translation, and proofing it all to a hard quality bar. Pressing a book is how that work gets funded. When enough readers press it, Book I · the opening gets made — and then it is free to read forever, for you and for everyone who comes after.
This isn’t a purchase. It’s a commission. You’re not buying a copy — you’re paying for the thing to exist, and putting your name (if you like) on the first true A True Story that anyone can read for free.
Leave your email and we’ll write to you the day the A True Story opens — no other mail, ever.
Read our finished collection · the library · The Great Library Project
Reading is always free. Patrons and founders are the ones who keep it that way.