Kathasaritsagara is a 11th-century collection of Indian legends, fairy tales and folk tales as retold by a Saivite Brahmin named Somadeva. It consists of 18 books of 124 chapters and more than 21,000 verses in addition to prose sections. The principal tale is the narrative of the adventures of Naravahanadatta, son of the legendary king Udayana. A large number of tales are built around this central story, making it the largest existing collection of Indian tales.
Berton Roueché was a medical writer who wrote for The New Yorker magazine for almost fifty years.
Blaugast by Paul Leppin is the story of ruin. A bored clerk, Klaudius Blaugast, pursues his desires down a path spiralling into complete degradation. Homeless and destitute, having lost everything to the evil prostitute Wanda, he seeks redemption in a Prague that has become alien to him. Flashbacks to incidents in his past, hallucinatory revelations of the meaning of events long forgotten, point to the seeds of his eventual downfall.
Catullus 16 by the Roman poet was considered so explicit that a full English translation was not openly published until the late 20th century.
Augustus Hare was a travel writer, a storyteller and memoirist of the first order, and his work is a record of a lost way of life amongst the strangest upper classes of English society.
He was known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised.
Begun when W.N.P. Barbellion was 13 years old, The Journal of a Disappointed Man at first catalogues Barbellion's misadventures in the Devon countryside - collecting birds' eggs, spying girls through binoculars - but evolves into a deeply moving account of his struggle with poverty, his lack of formal education, his flailing attempts at love, and most harrowing of all his slow death from multiple sclerosis.
In Jan Potocki's literary masterpiece, we are given over to a mind-bending number of stories, stories within stories, and stories within stories within stories. There is, however, also a strong framing narrative, involving a young Wolloon Guard, Alphonse Von Worden, and his peregrinations through the possibly haunted Sierra Moreno and beyond, in the company of, amongst others, cabbalists, sexy lesbian Muslim sisters, gypsies, bandits, and hanged men.
In this book, the Baron's astounding feats included riding cannonballs, travelling to the Moon, and escaping from a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair.
The Little Red Schoolbook is a book written by two Danish schoolteachers. The book encourages young people to question societal norms and instructs them in how to do this. Out of 200 pages, it includes 20 pages on sex and 30 on drugs, including alcohol and tobacco.