Press
Literah turns classic literature into something you can scroll at midnight. 126 classics, each rebuilt as an illustrated world you move through by touch — the cast, the places, the objects, the passages, all cross-linked. Not a summary. Not a study guide. Not an ebook reader. A map of the book, to explore beside it.
No ads. No algorithm. No subscription. No engagement tricks.
Boilerplate (100 words)
Literah is a literary exploration companion: 126 public-domain classics rebuilt as illustrated, navigable worlds, designed for the phone in your hand at eleven at night. Each world maps a book's characters, settings, objects and key passages as illustrated cards, cross-referenced so a reader can wander rather than progress — a map to explore beside the book, before, during or after reading. Passages appear verbatim — nothing trimmed, nothing paraphrased. Literah was designed, written and illustrated by Fernando Lopez, a retired software developer in Curitiba, Brazil, working alone. It runs in the browser, requires no app store, carries no advertising, and is sold once rather than rented.
The story
Fernando Lopez spent forty years in software — development, then sales — and retired with the two loves he'd carried the whole way: literature and history.
He also had a habit he didn't like. Phone in hand, late at night, scrolling. TikTok and Instagram offered infinite content and nothing to keep. He went looking for an alternative — something that would take the same twenty minutes and leave something behind — and found study guides, summary apps, and ebook readers. Nothing built for the way people actually hold a phone at midnight.
So he built it. Alone, over a year, in Curitiba: 126 classics rebuilt as illustrated worlds, well over a hundred images each, every line of code his own. Crime and Punishment as a place you can walk through. Middlemarch as a cast you can meet. The Grand Inquisitor, verbatim, on a card you can hold.
Literah is not a company and was not built to become one. It was built because a 60-year-old reader wanted it to exist and nobody had made it.
Quotes
“I spent forty years building software for other people. This is the first thing I built for myself.”
“I didn't want to stop looking at my phone. I wanted something worth looking at.”
“Every reader has already imagined the book. I'm just drawing them the map.”
“I hate wasting time on useless content. That's the whole product, really.”
“There's no algorithm in Literah. Nothing decides what you see next except you.”
On the illustrations
That's a deliberate choice and worth being direct about.
126 books at over a hundred images each is about 16,000 illustrations. No publisher has ever commissioned that, and no illustrator was ever going to be offered the job. The alternative to generated imagery wasn't hand-painted Dostoevsky — it was nothing.
The art direction is equally deliberate. Literah aims for the look of prints from a movie reel: photographic, cinematic, period-accurate. The goal was never to imitate an illustrator. It was to give readers a face for every character and a street for every place in the book they love.
The writing — every interpretation, every passage selected, every connection between characters, places and themes — is Fernando's. A machine made the pictures. A person made the map.
At a glance
| Product | Literah — literary worlds worth scrolling |
| Web | literah.world |
| Creator | Fernando Lopez, sole developer, designer and editor |
| Based in | Curitiba, Brazil |
| Worlds at launch | 126 |
| Images | 100+ per world, ~16,000 total |
| Sources | Public domain editions (Project Gutenberg and equivalents) |
| Platform | Progressive web app — runs in any browser, no app store |
| Business model | One-time purchase. No subscription, no advertising, no data collection for advertising. |
| Status | Pre-launch, waiting list open |
| @literah_world |
About Fernando Lopez
Short (35 words)
Fernando Lopez is a retired software developer and sales professional in Curitiba, Brazil, with forty years in IT. He built Literah alone — every line of code, every world — to fill a need nobody else had.
Long (110 words)
Fernando Lopez, 60, spent four decades in information technology, moving between software development and sales, before retiring in Brazil. A lifelong reader of literature and history with little patience for content that leaves nothing behind, he began building Literah as a personal project: an answer to the question of what a reader should do with a phone at eleven at night. He wrote all of the code himself, directed all of the imagery, and selected and annotated every passage across 126 classics. He lives in Curitiba and is not looking for investors, a co-founder, or a company. He is looking for readers who wanted the same thing he did.
Assets
All assets free to use in coverage of Literah, no permission needed, credit appreciated.
Contact
Fernando Lopez
Email — coming soon
Journalists and newsletter writers: tell me which book you'd like to see and I'll send you that world, free and open, no signup.