Even in antiquity, stories often began in medias res. The Iliad opens on the last year of a ten-year conflict, plunging us head-first into the animosities of two men, Achilles and Agamemnon, whose anger towards each other we are ill-equipped to understand. The Odyssey begins on Ithaca, in Odysseus’ absence, where Telemachus, the son who never knew his father, stands on the brittle brink of adulthood. When we first meet Odysseus, in book V, he is not about to embark on his famous journey, but already on Calypso’s island, two stops from home. He will tell his story once he makes it to Phaeacia, but the Cyclops and the Sirens are already long behind him. Today, of course, a story might begin anywhere at all – in the middle, at the end, or both at once. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake begins with the end of a sentence that the end of the book begins, while the great Flann O’Brien starts his At Swim-Two-Birds: “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.”