English Storytelling

Pixar movies have transfixed viewers around the world and stirred a hunger in creative and corporate realms to adopt new and more impactful ways of telling stories. Former Pixar and The Simpsons animator and story artist Matthew Luhn translates his two and half decades of storytelling techniques and concepts to the CEOs, advertisers, marketers, and creatives in the business world and beyond. The Best Story Wins retells the "Hero's Journey" story building methods through the lens of the Pixar films to help business minds embrace the power of storytelling for themselves!

From the break-out star of BuzzFeed and the People's Choice Award-winning comedian comes a collection of hilariously anguished essays chronicling awful moments from his life so far, the humiliations of being an adult, and other little indignities. Matt Bellassai has no idea what he's doing. Well, to be fair, he did become semi-Internet famous by getting drunk at work, making him a socially-acceptable - nay - professional alcoholic. He's got some things figured out. But the rest is all just a terrible, disgusting mess.

There are a host of neuroscientific explanations for why laughter makes us feel so great. Laughter triggers "feel good" chemicals in the brain which activate opiate receptors throughout your body and mind. Creating a workplace culture in which laughter is not only allowed but expected is an important step in building the trust, openness, authenticity, storytelling, and teamwork (TOAST) that are essential to any healthy collaborative environment.

Motherhood is the toughest - and funniest - job you'll ever love. Raising kids is hard work. The pay sucks, your boss is a tyrant, and the working conditions are pitiful - you can't even take a bathroom break without being interrupted with another outrageous demand. Hasn't every mother said it before? "I just want to pee alone!" Hear these hysterical essays.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US government sent thousands of Japanese American citizens to detention camps. In 1945, three Japanese-American sisters return to their farm in Stockton, California, after years in an internment camp, but the once prosperous family finds it’s not easy to pick up the pieces of their former lives. As the details of their deceased father’s final arrangements emerge, the sisters must work together to keep their dreams alive.

In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from Biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing his book thematically into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy - including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar - Dauber explores the ways Jewish comedy has dealt with persecution, assimilation, and diaspora through the ages. He explains the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the JAP, and the schlemiel and schlimazel.

In Storytelling Made Easy, legendary Hollywood script consultant and story expert Michael Hauge will guide you to simply and easily apply the story principles he has learned and developed over the last 40 years to your own live, written and recorded presentations.

This book identifies seven stages of therapy that provide a framework for working with client's emotional, cognitive, somatic, and sensory experiences to heal from trauma. Through composite case illustrations, practitioners will learn how to safely mitigate a range of trauma content, including complicated grief, natural disaster, children in foster care, aggression, toxic divorce, traumatized infants diagnosed with neonatal abstinence syndrome, and young mothers recovering from opioid addiction.

The best-selling author of American Housewife is back with a fiercely funny collection of essays on marriage and manners, thank-you notes and three-ways, ghosts, gunshots, gynecology, and the Calgon-scented, onion-dipped, monogrammed art of living as a Southern lady.

Nobody needs advice, but everybody wants it. Conversely, everybody wants to give advice but we need to. It's in our blood...because we're stoned. That's the point. And what better way to legitimize two stoned people's need to babble advice than with a book? Allow us to introduce ourselves: We're Tracie and Rich. We go way back. We host an Internet video series in which we answer viewer-submitted questions, solving their problems with the help of an herbal remedy. Basically we get stoned and tell people how to live their lives. At this point, we want to get higher, and take things to the next level....

Embra, winter of 1574. Queen Mary has fled Scotland, to raise an army from the French. Her son and heir, Jamie, is held under protection in Stirling Castle. John Knox is dead. The people are unmoored and lurching under the uncertain governance of this riven land. It's a deadly time for young student Will Fowler, short of stature, low of birth but mightily ambitious, to make his name.

Hello. It's Todd Barry. Yes, the massively famous comedian. I have billons of fans all over the world, so I do my fair share of touring. While I love doing shows in the big cities (New York, Chicago, Cleveland), I also enjoy a good secondary market (Rochester, Springfield, Toledo). There's something great about performing in a place where they don't expect to see you.

The Write Structure uncovers the hidden truths of the best stories, allowing new and advanced writers to better understand their own stories and make them better.

In Finding Your Funny Muscle, Mike shows you how to “flex” your ideas into funny, original, and relatable humor that gets big laughs—and makes you memorable for the right reasons.

Three complete stories in one collection! Includes The Vanishing Passenger, The Giant Yo-Yo Mystery, and The Creature in Ogopogo Lake!

A number of years ago, I heard some stories about ranch and Western life I thought were among the funniest anecdotes I had ever heard. It started a quest. Over a 10-year span, I interviewed 150 cowboys, ranchers, and others, mostly in Texas and Nebraska. The result is Cowboys, Ranchers, and Assorted Characters: True Tales from the New West. It's the best of the best anecdotes from those encounters.

In the summer of 2004, Tony James Slater went to Ecuador looking to become a man. Not all of him returned. But the bit that did was fueled by a burning desire to do...something. Something that mattered. And, ideally, to get the hell out of England in the process.

An essay from Things I've Learned From the Women Who've Dumped Me.

This collection includes The Mystery at the Calgary Stampede, The Sleepy Hollow Mystery, and The Legend of the Irish Castle.

I was at my wit's end. I'd had enough of this job, this life, and my relationship had broken up. Should I eat chocolate, or go to India, or fall in love? Then I had a revelation: Why not do all three, in that order? And so it was that I embarked on a journey that was segmented into three parts and was then made into a major motion picture. Later, I woke up on an airplane with a hole in my face and a really bad hangover. I was ushered brusquely off the plane by my parents who took me to a rehab.