A letter is the only literary form that requires a single reader. Not an audience, not a public, not posterity — one specific named person, in a different room. Across two thousand years that constraint has produced some of the best prose in any language.
Twelve writers, twelve letters, twelve chapters. Cicero in exile writing to Atticus in Athens. Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius to Tacitus, twenty-five years after he watched it across the bay. Madame de Sévigné writing to her daughter twice a week for twenty-five years and inventing French prose along the way. Lord Chesterfield writing his illegitimate son a manual for how to be in society. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writing from the Ottoman court about smallpox inoculation. Goethe writing seventeen hundred letters to a married woman he was not sleeping with. Vincent writing six hundred and fifty letters to Theo about the price of paint. Kafka writing five hundred letters to Felice in four years. Virginia Woolf writing to Vita and turning Vita into Orlando. James Baldwin writing to his fifteen-year-old nephew in 1962. Susan Sontag writing emails by 2004 that read exactly like Cicero.
The form has not died. It changed servers.
Each chapter is one letter, one writer, one moment. The vocabulary cycles around a small set of recurring nouns — the letter, the friend, the page, the day — and the pedagogical work is in the variety of registers: Cicero formal, Sévigné gossipy, Kafka anxious, Baldwin furious, Sontag terse. B1 is the right level for that kind of register-switching: you have past, present, future, conditional; you can handle a piece of writing that sounds like a person, not a textbook scenario.
Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Personal Letter was originally written in English, but you choose your reading language when you start.
B1. Intermediate. You read narrative past tense fluently, handle dialogue, and understand short novellas. Vocabulary around 3,000 words. Subordinate clauses no longer slow you down.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Personal Letter is rated B1, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
Use this code in the app for 30% off your first year of Storica Pro.