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Panji tales
The Panji tales are a cycle of Javanese stories about Prince Panji and Princess Candra Kirana, who are separated and reunited after many trials, originating in Java around the 13th century.
Pansori novel
The pansori novel (판소리계 소설) is a Joseon-era classical Korean prose novel formed under the influence of pansori song texts, including Chunhyangjeon, Simcheongjeon, and Bae Bijangjeon.
Papéis Avulsos
Papéis Avulsos is an 1882 short-story collection by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, his third, which carries the ironic realism of Memórias Póstumas into twelve stories including "O alienista".
Paper Girl
Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America is Beth Macy's 2025 Penguin Press memoir-reportage hybrid about her poor childhood in Urbana, Ohio, and her hometown's decline; a National Book Critics Circle finalist and Obama favorite.
Paper Girls
Paper Girls: creator-owned Image Comics series (2015-2019, 30 issues) by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang about four 12-year-old paper delivery girls in 1988 Ohio caught in a time war; adapted for Prime Video in 2022.
Paperback
Paperback (softcover): a glue-bound book with a flexible cardboard cover. Covers the mass-market paperback (small, cheap, about 4 by 7 inches) pioneered by Albatross in 1932 and Penguin in 1935, versus larger trade paperbacks; mass-market unit sales fell about 84 percent from 2004 to 2024.
Papillon (book)
Papillon is Henri Charrière's 1969 Robert Laffont autobiographical narrative of imprisonment in the French Guiana penal colony and repeated escapes; a bestseller in over 20 languages, twice filmed, with disputed truth claims.
Pâques à New York
Les Pâques à New York is a long poem by Blaise Cendrars, written in New York in 1912 and regarded as a founding text of modern French poetry.
Para Viver um Grande Amor
Para Viver um Grande Amor is a 1962 book of chronicles and poems by the Brazilian poet and songwriter Vinicius de Moraes, his first book of prose.
Parable
A parable (Greek parabolē, Hebrew mashal) is a short realistic story with human characters that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson through comparison; distinct from the fable's talking animals, though modern scholarship questions that boundary.
Parade's End
Parade's End is Ford Madox Ford's modernist tetralogy (1924–1928): Some Do Not..., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up–, Last Post, following Christopher Tietjens from Edwardian England through World War I; adapted by Tom Stoppard for BBC/HBO in 2012.
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost, John Milton's blank-verse epic (1667 in ten books; 1674 in twelve), retells Satan's rebellion and the Fall of man; dictated by the blind Milton, it became the defining Christian epic in English.
Paradise Regained
Paradise Regained, John Milton's 1671 blank-verse brief epic in four books, retells Christ's temptation in the wilderness, reversing Paradise Lost with a plainer style, georgic heroism, and a divided critical reception.
Paradiso (Dante)
Paradiso, third and final cantica of Dante's Divina Commedia: 33 cantos in which Beatrice guides the poet through nine celestial spheres to the Empyrean and the final vision of the Trinity in Canto 33.
Paral Ko Aago
Paral Ko Aago (परालको आगो, "A Straw Fire") is a realistic Nepali short story by Guru Prasad Mainali, collected in his anthology Naso, about a farmer's quarrel with his wife.
Parallel universes in fiction
Parallel universes in fiction: self-contained alternate worlds coexisting with our own, from Rosny aîné and Wells through Leinster's 1934 "Sidewise in Time" to Everett-inspired cinematic multiverses like Everything Everywhere All at Once.
Parani
Parani is a Tamil literary genre, a heroic epic praising a warrior who slew a thousand elephants; its earliest and finest work is the 12th-century Kalingathupparani.
Parasyte (寄生獣)
Parasyte (寄生獣, Kiseijū) is Hitoshi Iwaaki's science-fiction horror manga serialized in Kodansha's Afternoon from 1988 to 1995 in 10 volumes, about Shinichi Izumi and the right-hand parasite Migi; it won the 1993 Kodansha Manga Award and 1996 Seiun Award and inspired a Madhouse anime, live-action films, and Netflix's Parasyte: The Grey.
Parchment
Parchment, also called animal membrane, is a writing material made from stretched, untanned calf, goat, or sheep skin that superseded papyrus in Europe during the early Middle Ages.
Pardon the Intrusion, I'm Home!
Pardon the Intrusion, I'm Home! (ただいま、おじゃまされます！, Tadaima, Ojamasaremasu!) is a full-color shoujo romcom manga by Watomura about otaku office worker Rinko whose apartment connects to her neighbors' via wall holes; adapted into a 2026 Tatsunoko anime.
Parenthetical referencing
Parenthetical referencing places source identification, author with date or page, inside parentheses in the text, as in APA (Author, Year), MLA (Author Page), and Chicago author-date styles.
Parevi Sandesha
Parevi Sandesha (Parevi Sandeshaya, "The Pigeon's Message") is a classical Sinhala sandesha kavya of the Kotte period attributed to the monk-poet Thotagamuwe Sri Rahula Thera.
Parijatapaharanam
Parijatapaharanam, a sixteenth-century Telugu court poem by Nandi Timmana, recounts Krishna's theft of the celestial pārijāta tree to please Satyabhama, composed at Krishnadevaraya's Vijayanagara court.
Parijatapaharanamu
Parijatapaharanamu (Telugu: పారిజాతాపహరణము) is a sixteenth-century Telugu epic poem by the court poet Nandi Timmana, retelling Krishna's theft of the wish-granting pārijāta tree from Indra and counted among the most celebrated Telugu prabandhas.
Pariksha Guru
Pariksha Guru (परीक्षा गुरु, "The Testing Master") is an 1882 novel by Lala Srinivas Das, generally considered the first novel in Hindi, telling of a wealthy Delhi man's fall and reform.
Parimelalakar's commentary on the Tirukkural
Parimelalakar's commentary on the Tirukkural (பரிமேலழகர் உரை) is a gloss composed around 1271 by the Tamil scholar Parimelalakar on Tiruvalluvar's 1,330-couplet ethical classic, the most influential of ten medieval commentaries.
Paripadal
Paripadal (பரிபாடல்) is a classical Tamil anthology of the Sangam corpus, the fifth of the Eight Anthologies, whose musical hymns to Thirumal and Murugan are called India's earliest bhakti poems.
Parody
Parody imitates a creative work in exaggerated, comedic fashion as criticism or commentary. From Greek parōidia; distinguished from pastiche and satire; protected under US fair use and Canadian fair dealing.
Paroemiography
Paroemiography is the ancient Greek scholarly genre of collecting proverbs into ordered books, beginning with Aristotle and carried on by compilers such as Zenobius and Diogenianus.
Parthiban Kanavu
Parthiban Kanavu (பார்த்திபன் கனவு, "Parthiban's Dream") is a Tamil historical novel by Kalki R. Krishnamurthy, his first, set in the 7th century and serialized from 1941 to 1943.