The average American watches 5 hours of TV every day. Collectively, we spend roughly $30 billion on movies each year. Simply put, we're entertainment junkies. But can we learn something from our insatiable addiction to stories? Mike Cosper thinks so. From horror flicks to rom-coms, the tales we tell and the myths we weave inevitably echo the narrative underlying all of history: the story of humanity's tragic sin and God's triumphant salvation. This entertaining book connects the dots between the stories we tell and the one, great Story—helping us better understand the longings of the human heart and thoughtfully engage with the movies and TV shows that capture our imaginations.
Throughout history we have told ourselves stories to try and make sense of our place in the universe. Richard Holloway takes us on a personal, scientific and philosophical journey to explore what he believes the answers to the biggest of questions are. He examines what we know about the universe into which we are propelled at birth and from which we are expelled at death, the stories we have told about where we come from, and the stories we tell to get through this muddling experience of life. Thought-provoking, revelatory, compassionate and playful, Stories We Tell Ourselves is a personal reckoning with life’s mysteries by one of the most important and beloved thinkers of our time.
Bestselling author Patti Callahan Henry is back with a powerful novel about the stories we tell and the people we trust. Eve and Cooper Morrison are Savannah's power couple. They're on every artistic board and deeply involved in the community. She owns and operates a letterpress studio specializing in the handmade; he runs a digital magazine featuring all things southern gentlemen. The perfect juxtaposition of the old and the new, Eve and Cooper are the beautiful people. The lucky ones. And they have the wealth and name that comes from being part of an old Georgia family. But things may not be as good as they seem. Eve's sister, Willa, is staying with the family until she gets "back on her feet." Their daughter, Gwen, is all adolescent rebellion. And Cooper thinks Eve works too much. Still, the Morrison marriage is strong. After twenty-one years together, Eve and Cooper know each other. They count on each other. They know what to expect. But when Cooper and Willa are involved in a car accident, the questions surrounding the event bring the family close to breaking point. Sifting between the stories—what Cooper says, what Willa remembers, what the evidence indicates—Eve has to find out what really happened. And what she's going to do about it. A riveting story about the power of truth, The Stories we Tell will open your eyes and rearrange your heart.
A collection of twenty-six of the finest stories by the finest women writers to come out of the U.S. and Canada in the past fifty years. Organized by publication date, authors include Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Anne Tyler, Tama Janowitz, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Gordon, and Alice Walker.
The two thought-provoking, extended essays that make up Stories We Tell Ourselves draw from the author’s richly diverse experiences and history, taking the reader on a deeply pleasurable walk to several unexpectedly profound destinations. A steady accumulation of fascinating science, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history—ranging as far and wide as neuro-ophthalmology, ancient dream interpretation, and the essential differences between Jung and Freud—is smoothly intermixed with vivid anecdotes, entertaining digressions, and a disarming willingness to risk everything in the course of a revealing personal narrative. “Dream Life” plumbs the depth of dreams—conceptually, biologically, and as the nursery of our most meaningful metaphors—as it considers dreams and dreaming every whichway: from the haruspicy of the Roman Empire to contemporary sleep and dream science, from the way birds dream to the way babies do, from our longing to tell them to the reasons we wish other people wouldn’t. “Seeing Things” recounts a journey of mother and daughter—a Holmes-and-Watson pair intrepidly working their way through the mysteries of a disorder known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome—even as it restlessly detours into the world beyond the looking glass of the unconscious itself. In essays that constantly offer layers of surprises and ever-deeper insights, the author turns a powerful lens on the relationships that make up a family, on expertise and unsatisfying diagnoses, on science and art and the pleasures of contemplation and inquiry—and on our fears, regrets, hopes, and (of course) dreams.
*National Bestseller* Legendary musician Richard Marx offers an enlightening, entertaining look at his life and career. Richard Marx is one of the most accomplished singer-songwriters in the history of popular music. His self-titled 1987 album went triple platinum and made him the first male solo artist (and second solo artist overall after Whitney Houston) to have four singles from their debut crack the top three on the Billboard Hot 100. His follow-up, 1989’s Repeat Offender, was an even bigger smash, going quadruple platinum and landing two singles at number one. He has written fourteen number one songs in total, shared a Song of the Year Grammy with Luther Vandross, and collaborated with a variety of artists including NSYNC, Josh Groban, Natalie Cole, and Keith Urban. Lately, he’s also become a Twitter celebrity thanks to his outspokenness on social issues and his ability to out-troll his trolls. In Stories to Tell, Marx uses this same engaging, straight-talking style to look back on his life and career. He writes of how Kenny Rogers changed a single line of a song he’d written for him then asked for a 50% cut—which inspired Marx to write one of his biggest hits. He tells the uncanny story of how he wound up curled up on the couch of Olivia Newton-John, his childhood crush, watching Xanadu. He shares the tribulations of working with the all-female hair metal band Vixen and appearing in their video. Yet amid these entertaining celebrity encounters, Marx offers a more sobering assessment of the music business as he’s experienced it over four decades—the challenges of navigating greedy executives and grueling tour schedules, and the rewards of connecting with thousands of fans at sold-out shows that make all the drama worthwhile. He also provides an illuminating look at his songwriting process and talks honestly about how his personal life has inspired his work, including finding love with wife Daisy Fuentes and the mystery illness that recently struck him—and that doctors haven’t been able to solve. Stories to Tell is a remarkably candid, wildly entertaining memoir about the art and business of music.
Change the story. Change your life. From imagined catastrophes to play-by-play interpretations of others' behavior, we are expert storytellers, quick to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, all too often our behavior is determined by baseless suspicions, which trigger needless pain. Real life passes us by as we fall for powerful fantasies of our own creation. It doesn't have to be this way. In The Stories We Tell Ourselves, author and therapist Scott Gornto shows us how to break the cycle of false assumptions that lead to unnecessary anxiety. By taking control of our reactions to the people around us, we can learn how to be truly present in our lives as we nurture the relationships that matter most. Based on more than 20 years of research and experience, Gornto demonstrates how family narratives, media, and past experiences shape compelling story lines that blind us to reality and wreak havoc on our relationships. Through persuasive examples, he models fresh, life-enhancing approaches to engaging with friends, business associates, and loved ones alike. Don't waste your life making up stories. The Stories We Tell Ourselves is a wake-up call and a compassionate, accessible guide to transforming your relationships-and your life.
Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.
There are stories we never talk about. Stories we are afraid to share. Simply because they hurt too much or no one wants to listen to them. Such was the story of Jhanvi, who is a budding social media influencer. She appears to have it all together, living her ideal life, but something is missing: Jhanvi has this impossible need that drives her to be more perfect than any person could possibly be. And the story of Ashray, who had a rocky start in life. With hard work and determination, he translates his dreams into reality, but his deep-seated insecurities come to the fore when life throws him a curveball. As their stories intersect, their lives change in ways they never expected. In a world of loss, darkness and destruction, will Jhanvi and Ashray be able to tell a story of hope, light and recovery?
If you ask someone the question, "Tell me a story that changed your life," there will almost certainly be a thoughtful pause before a huge grin emerges. Everyone's life has been guided and impacted by stories, beginning with the earliest fables and nursery rhymes our parents used to instill moral values to the last time you wanted to illustrate a point in a meeting or get a laugh out of a friend over dinner. Storytelling is a uniquely human activity, among our first and most enduring forms of communication. This is a book about the meaning of stories in people's lives, especially those that have produced enduring changes in their values, behavior, lifestyle, and worldview. Carefully documented and supported by research from the social sciences, as well as from neurobiology, the humanities, media studies, and arts, Jeffrey Kottler will explore how and why stories are so powerfully influential in people's lives, especially those that lead to major life transformations.
