World's Most Influential Stories

The list tries to include influential fictional stories, the narratives you can't help but notice everywhere in our culture.
- every single human culture is sophisticated enough to have folk tales and I wouldn't even know where to begin and where to end... (I included The Grimm Brothers because they took the stories to paper and so have become super popular)
- I chose epic poems from every major area (at least 1)
- from hero tales to junkie tales. From ancient tales to post colonial stories. From knights to spaceships and everything in between
- poems are only included if they are very influential to multiple cultures, like Chinese poetry for instance, but epic poems are preferred
- I tried to include from as many areas as possible (just because Vietnam or Finland did not have the empire or industry or historical context to spread their culture as much as England or France, doesn't mean that their epic poems are not important to many people
- I avoided non fiction or philosophy books