About
The idea
Every day, oneoneone picks one poem, one essay, and one short story. Everyone who visits sees the same three. There's no algorithm and no personalization, so it works more like a newspaper than a feed: the same thing, for everyone, on the same day.
Ray Bradbury's thousand nights
This comes from a talk Ray Bradbury gave about his own reading habits. For a thousand nights, he read one short story, one poem, and one essay before bed, and said it shaped his whole career as a writer.
He wasn't casual about what he picked, either. For short stories he wanted writers heavy on metaphor, like Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Roald Dahl, rather than the quiet, realistic fiction he thought had trained writers out of using imagery. For poems he read the classic masters, Shakespeare, Pope, Frost, instead of modern experimental verse. And for essays he picked writers who had nothing to do with literature at all, working in anthropology, zoology, or biology, like Loren Eiseley and Aldous Huxley, because they could describe a fact about nature so it landed like a metaphor.
His point wasn't really about any one piece. Do this long enough and your head fills up with more ideas than you can consciously track. Eventually they start combining on their own, and what comes out when you write ends up actually yours.
oneoneone is that same routine, made public. Anyone can start their own thousand nights today and read the same three things everyone else is reading.
What we actually read
Everything in the catalog is public domain. We pull from Project Gutenberg, Wikisource, and similar archives, and verify each work before using it. That limits us: some of the writers Bradbury actually named, like Dahl, Huxley, and Eiseley, are still under copyright. When that happens we look for someone in the same vein instead, Poe, Hawthorne, and Saki standing in for Dahl, T. H. Huxley and John Muir standing in for Huxley and Eiseley. The goal is to keep the spirit of his list, not copy it exactly.
Contact
Found a bad transcription? Have a work to suggest? Just want to say something? Email hello@readoneoneone.com.