The Canterbury Tales is a collection of twenty-four stories that runs to over 17,000 lines written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387 and 1400. It is widely regarded as Chaucer's magnum opus. The tales are presented as part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark on their return.
"Edda" is an Old Norse term that has been attributed by modern scholars to the collective of two Medieval Icelandic literary works: what is now known as the Prose Edda and an older collection of poems without an original title now known as the Poetic Edda. The term historically referred only to the Prose Edda, but this since has fallen out of use because of the confusion with the other work. Both works were written down in Iceland during the 13th century in Icelandic, although they contain material from earlier traditional sources, reaching into the Viking Age. The books are the main sources of medieval skaldic tradition in Iceland and Norse mythology.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra, is a work of philosophical fiction written by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche between 1883 and 1885. The protagonist is nominally the historical Zoroaster, but, besides a handful of sentences, Nietzsche is not concerned with a specific resemblance. Much of the book purports to be what Zarathustra said, and it repeats the refrain, "Thus spoke Zarathustra."
Vacuum Diagrams is a collection of science fiction short stories by British writer Stephen Baxter. The collection connects the novels of the Xeelee Sequence and also shows the history of mankind in the Xeelee universe, and ultimately the universe. While each short story in the collection is self-contained, the stories are presented as being contained in the context of the first story, "Eve", about a man who is forced to witness the events in the short stories by a god-like being. "Eve" acts as a structure for the short stories, with an introduction at the beginning of Vacuum Diagrams, short scenes occurring between each "era", and an ending that wraps up the plot for the "Eve" story itself. Vacuum Diagrams won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1999.
David Rowland Langford is a British author, editor, and critic, largely active within the science fiction field. He publishes the science fiction fanzine and newsletter Ansible, and holds the all-time record for most Hugo Awards, with a total of 29 wins.
The Heptaméron is a collection of 72 short stories written in French by Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), published posthumously in 1558. It has the form of a frame narrative and was inspired by The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. It was originally intended to contain one hundred stories covering ten days like The Decameron, but at Marguerite’s death it was completed only as far as the second story of the eighth day. Many of the stories deal with love, lust, infidelity, and other romantic and sexual matters. One was based on the life of Marguerite de La Rocque, a French noblewoman who was punished by being abandoned with her lover on an island off Quebec.
"In Memoriam A.H.H." is a poem by the British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published in 1850. It is a requiem for the poet's beloved Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833, aged 22. It contains some of Tennyson's most accomplished lyrical work, and is an unusually sustained exercise in lyric verse. It is widely considered to be one of the greatest poems of the 19th century.
The incipit of a text is the first few words of the text, employed as an identifying label. In a musical composition, an incipit is an initial sequence of notes, having the same purpose. The word incipit comes from Latin and means "it begins". Its counterpart taken from the ending of the text is the explicit.
Fictions is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, produced between 1941 and 1956. The English translation of Fictions was published in 1962, the same year as Labyrinths, a separate compilation of Borges's translated works. The two volumes lifted Borges to worldwide literary fame in the 1960s and several stories feature in both. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" originally appeared published in A History of Eternity (1936).
A prologue or prologe is an opening to a story that establishes the context and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information. The Ancient Greek prólogos included the modern meaning of prologue, but was of wider significance, more like the meaning of preface. The importance, therefore, of the prologue in Greek drama was very great; it sometimes almost took the place of a romance, to which, or to an episode in which, the play itself succeeded.
An epilogue or epilog is a piece of writing at the end of a work of literature, usually used to bring closure to the work. It is presented from the perspective of within the story. When the author steps in and speaks directly to the reader, that is more properly considered an afterword. The opposite is a prologue—a piece of writing at the beginning of a work of literature or drama, usually used to open the story and capture interest. Some genres, for example television programs and video games, call the epilogue an "outro" patterned on the use of "intro" for "introduction".
Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper is a short collection of English poems by Robert Browning, published in 1876. The collection marked Browning's first collection of short pieces for more than twelve years, and was well received. The title poem, which ostensibly discusses the life and works of 15th Century Italian painter Giacomo Pacchiarotti, is actually a thinly veiled attack on Browning's own critics, and many other pieces in the collection take the same tone.
Ferishtah's Fancies is a book of poetry by Robert Browning first published in 1884. Technically the book is one long poem divided into twelve parts, but the parts are so disparate that many critics have considered it a collection of shorter pieces rather than a lengthy whole.
"Brokeback Mountain" is a short story by American author Annie Proulx. It was originally published in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997, for which it won the National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1998. Proulx won a third place O. Henry Award for the story in 1998. A slightly expanded version of the story was published in Proulx's 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. The collection was a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Off the Sand Road (2002), subtitled Ghost Stories, Volume One, is a posthumously published collection of short stories by Russell Kirk (1918–1994). It is the first of two such hardcover collections from Ash-Tree Press, a small but respected contemporary publisher of ghost stories, classic and new alike. Together with its companion volume, What Shadows We Pursue (2003), it presents the entire corpus of Kirk's short fiction—the only such undertaking by any publisher—including some pieces more accurately categorized as horror, fantasy, or science fiction.
The Book of Sand is a 1975 short story collection by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the author's opinion, the collection, written in his last days — and while blind — is his best book. This opinion is not shared by most critics, many of whom prefer his other works such as those in Ficciones (1944).
The Illustrated Man is a 1969 American dark science fiction drama film directed by Jack Smight and starring Rod Steiger as a man whose tattoos on his body represent visions of frightening futures. The film is based on three short stories from the 1951 collection The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury: "The Veldt," "The Long Rain," and "The Last Night of the World."
The Fellowship of the Ring is the first of three volumes of the epic novel The Lord of the Rings by the English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It is followed by The Two Towers and The Return of the King. It takes place in the fictional universe of Middle-earth, and was originally published on 29 July 1954 in the United Kingdom.
Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue is a compilation of games from the Kingdom Hearts series, developed and published by Square Enix in collaboration with Disney Interactive Studios. A successor to the Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 Remix game compilation, the new title was announced in September 2015 and released on January 24, 2017 on PlayStation 4, on February 18, 2020 on Xbox One, on March 30, 2021 on Microsoft Windows, and a cloud version of the game for Nintendo Switch was released on February 10, 2022.
"What's Past Is Prologue" is the eighth episode of the fifth season of the American television series The Flash, based on the DC Comics character Barry Allen / Flash, a crime scene investigator who gains super-human speed, which he uses to fight criminals, including others who have also gained superhuman abilities. It is set in the Arrowverse, sharing continuity with the other television series of the universe, and is a spin-off of Arrow. The episode was written by Todd Helbing and Lauren Certo, directed by Tom Cavanagh, and is the series' 100th episode.
