Puranas,mines of stories

 Our Puranas are mines of stories. There are totally eighteen Mahapuranas or major Puranas and eighteen Upapuranas or minor Puranas. There is a nice shloka or verse in Sanskrit to remember the names of Mahapuranas. It is like this:

madvayam bhadvayam chaiva bratrayam vachatushtayam/

anaapalingakuskani puranani prachakshyate //

It is actually a mnemonic.

 Here, madvayam means two from 'ma'-Matsya Purana and Markandeya Purana

bhadvayam means, two from 'bha'-Bhavishya Purana and Bhagavata Purana 

bratrayam means three from 'bra'-Brahma Purana, Brahmavaivarta Purana, and Brahmanda Purana 

va chatushtayam means four from 'va'-Vayu Purana, Vamana Purana, Vishnu Purana and Varaha Purana 

a-Agni Purana

naa-Narada Purana

pa-Padma Purana

lin-Linga Purana

ga-Garuda Purana

ku-Kurma Purana

ska-Skanda Purana

These are the eighteen Mahapuranas. Some Upapuranas are, Ganesha Purana, Shiva Purana, DeviBhagavata Purana, Kalki Purana, Kalika Purana, Samba Purana, Soura Purana, Kapila Purana, Vishnudharmottara Purana, Shivadharmottara Purana, Brihannaradiya Purana, Narasimha Purana, Mudgala Purana, and so on. The list of Upapuranas vary in each Purana. Some scholars classify some Puranas as Upopapuranas also, meaning sub minor Puranas. Some say Bhagavata is a mahapurana and DeviBhagavata is a upapurana and some argue vice-versa. The same controversy exists for Linga Purana and Shiva Purana also. Whether major or minor Puranas, their value doesn't come down. There are also Sthala Puranas which are narratives of holy places and temples.These are mostly oral narratives of those places based on the Puranas, sometimes new and differing from them. 

     This we have a huge corpus of story literature under the broad category of Puranas.The word  Purana is derived from two words 'puraa bhavam ' meaning that which happened in the past.It is also derived as, 'puraa api navam ' meaning that which is new even though old. Thus Puranas are old narratives of gods and goddesses, kings and queens, sages and divine beings, and of old clans, and of holy places and rivers etc having valuable messages relevant even for this day.