Aesop's Fables are short animal tales that turn ordinary encounters—a wolf and a lamb, a lion and a mouse, ants and a grasshopper—into clear morals about justice, prudence, gratitude, and folly. The Greek slave Aesop is the traditional name attached to a body of stories that circulated orally and in later collections; what survives for English readers is a tradition of brief narratives ending in a pointed lesson.
Genre
Collection
Hippocratic Writings is not a single book but a library of early Greek medicine: case histories, ethical rules, theoretical essays, surgical manuals, dietetic advice, aphorisms and polemics against rival healers. Its strongest works begin from the sickbed.
On Medicine, or De Medicina, is the most important surviving Latin medical work before late antiquity. Celsus organizes medicine into diet, drugs and surgery, giving Roman readers a lucid account of Greek medical learning without the dense polemic of specialist schools.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers gathers short texts from Christianity’s formative generations after the apostles. The collection usually includes 1 Clement, the letters of Ignatius, Polycarp’s letter, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, 2 Clement and fragments such as Papias or the Epistle to Diognetus, depending on edition.
The Library is the only complete handbook of Greek mythology to survive from antiquity. In plain, compressed prose it tells the traditional stories of the gods and heroes in order, from the beginning of the world to the death of Odysseus, organized chiefly by family lines.
Galen: Selected Works introduces a physician whose ambition was encyclopedic. The surviving Galenic corpus ranges from technical anatomy and pulse lore to philosophical defenses of method, from therapeutics and compound drugs to autobiography and polemic against rivals.
The Early Christian Creeds gathers short doctrinal texts that became durable summaries of Christian identity: baptismal symbols, conciliar formulas and later Western confessions. The Old Roman Symbol and the Apostles' Creed preserve the shape of early baptismal confession: belief in God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, the Spirit, the church, forgiveness, resurrection and life.
The Prose Edda is a handbook of Norse myth and of the art of skaldic poetry, written in Iceland around 1220 by the chieftain and historian Snorri Sturluson. It was meant to teach young poets the old stories and the poetic names (kennings) that the court verse of Scandinavia depended on, at a time when Iceland had been Christian for more than two centuries.
The Mabinogion is the name given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales, preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest, together with the Tale of Taliesin, which Lady Charlotte Guest added from a later source. The library text is Guest's translation in the one-volume form, with her introduction and a few of her notes; it follows her order, opening with the three Arthurian romances.
The Popol Vuh, the Book of the Mat or Council Book, is the sacred and historical book of the K'iche' Maya of highland Guatemala, written in K'iche' by anonymous nobles in the 1550s and preserved in Francisco Ximénez's copy of about 1701. The library's text is not a full translation but Lewis Spence's 1908 English study, which retells and partly translates the first books from Brasseur de Bourbourg's French and Ximénez's Spanish and then comments on them.
Napoleon dictated or wrote tens of thousands of letters, often several dozen a day, to generals, ministers, prefects, bishops, kings, his family and the women he loved. Napoleon III's government published a thirty-two-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier between 1858 and 1870, pruning letters that embarrassed the dynasty; the Fondation Napoléon's complete edition, begun in 2004, runs to more than forty thousand items.
A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys is Nathaniel Hawthorne's first book of Greek myths retold for children. Six stories are set inside a frame: Eustace Bright, an eighteen-year-old Williams College student on vacation, tells them to a crowd of children staying at Tanglewood, a country house in the Berkshires, whom Hawthorne gives flower and plant names such as Primrose, Periwinkle, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Squash-Blossom and Buttercup.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
The Heroes; or, Greek Fairy Tales for My Children is Charles Kingsley's retelling of three Greek hero legends, Perseus, the Argonauts and Theseus, written for his children Rose, Maurice and Mary. The preface is signed from Farley Court in Advent 1855, and the book was published by Macmillan in 1856.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
The Blue Fairy Book (1889), edited by Andrew Lang, gathers European fairy tales into one household volume that became the first of the famous colored fairy books. Lang and his collaborators retell stories from Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Madame d’Aulnoy, and other streams so that children meet Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, and many less anthologized tales in a single readable English.
This collection pairs Melville's posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor with the best of the short fiction he published in magazines in the 1850s, usually including Bartleby, the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas (contents vary by edition). Bartleby (1853) is narrated by a comfortable Wall Street lawyer who hires a pale, quiet copyist.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
Christ Legends is a book of eleven stories in which the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf retells and invents legends about the life of Jesus, from the night of His birth to the Crucifixion and after. Some come from old Christian tradition, some from folk tales, and some are her own; all are told in a simple, warm voice suited to reading aloud.
Thornton W. Burgess’s The Burgess Bird Book for Children (1919) teaches bird identification through Peter Rabbit’s visits in the Old Orchard, where Jenny Wren and neighbors speak in character while Burgess slips in real habits, songs, and looks. The method is story first, natural history second: children remember the House Wren because they met Jenny, then learn what to watch for outdoors.
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles is Padraic Colum's retelling for young readers of the voyage of the Argo, with many other Greek myths woven into it as stories told by the heroes on the way. It was published in New York by Macmillan in 1921, with illustrations by Willy Pogány, and was named a Newbery Honor book in 1922.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
The Portable Dorothy Parker collects poems, stories, sketches, reviews and occasional pieces that display Parker's distinctive mixture of speed, polish, cruelty and pain. The volume is not a single narrative but a portable career: the brittle lyrics of disappointed love, the dramatic monologues of women waiting for calls or managing humiliation, the social comedies of parties and hotel rooms, the criticism that makes taste sound conversational, and the political pieces that reveal moral seriousness beneath the pose of urban detachment.
The Portable Faulkner is not a single work in the usual sense but an edited map of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fiction. Malcolm Cowley arranged stories, novel excerpts, genealogical material and commentary so that readers could see Faulkner's invented county as one continuous historical field.