English Storytelling

Once, when young Nasruddin was acting up in class by distracting his classmates with endless antics, jests, and stories, his irate teacher uttered a curse: ''Whatever you do or say, wherever you go or stay, whether it's night or day - people will only laugh at you.'' Now, eight centuries later, people everywhere are still laughing at the immortal Mullah Nasruddin, one of the world's most beloved folk characters.

Juliette has always longed for everything she experiences in her beloved books—grand adventures, heroic deeds, passionate love, and making a meaningful difference. She wants it all. Yet, despite her found family, her dream bookshop, and a burgeoning connection with a sweet man, chronic anxiety keeps her tethered to a safe and predictable routine. Until her life is upended when an unexpected magical ability surfaces. Now gifted with the power to locate lost things, Juliette's world becomes a blend of wonder and anxiety.

Stories tether us to what matters most: our families, our friends, our hearts, our planet, the wondrous mystery of life itself. Yet the stories we've been telling ourselves as a civilization are killing us: Fear is wisdom. Vanity is virtuous. Violence is peace. In Between the Listening and the Telling, author and activist Mark Yaconelli leads listeners into an enchanting meditation on the power of storytelling in our individual and collective lives. We tell stories to remember who we are. We tell stories to savor the pleasure of living.

New York Times best-selling author and star of 2 Dope Queens Phoebe Robinson is back with a new, hilarious, and timely essay collection on gender, race, dating, and the Dumpster fire that is our world. Written in her trademark unfiltered and witty style, Robinson's latest collection is a call to arms. Outfitted with on-point pop culture references, these essays tackle a wide range of topics: giving feminism a tough-love talk on intersectionality, telling society's beauty standards to kick rocks, and calling foul on our culture's obsession with work.

Whoever you are, whatever you love, there’s a podcast audience waiting for you, and in today’s booming audio storytelling landscape, it’s never been easier to share your voice with the world. But while the barrier to entry for podcast production is relatively low, the learning curve is steep - and quality matters. That’s where NPR comes in. In NPR’s Podcast Start Up Guide, Glen Weldon draws on NPR’s extensive educational materials and army of talent to guide aspiring podcasters through the conception, creation, and launch of a podcast.

Storytelling is mission-critical to the advancement of our careers and our businesses. In this book, you'll learn how to create compelling presentations, write persuasive reports, and convey important messages in meetings with stories that capture the attention of your audiences.

"Writing is structure,” William Goldman said, but too often aspiring writers plunge into their work without grasping this fundamental principle. Story structure is one of the most important concepts for a writer to understand - and ironically, one of the least frequently taught. In this book, New York Times best-selling author William Bernhardt explains the elements that make stories work, using examples spanning from Gilgamesh to The Hunger Games.

It’s not easy being unabashedly famous. Fame. Fortune. Younger men. Being mistaken for different actresses who are slightly prettier and more famous than you. It’s all part of the gig, and Mary Lynn Rajskub is a pro. Hilarious and self-deprecating, Feme-ish is Rajskub’s debut collection of essays. Smart, satirical, and relatable, this book gives new meaning to the word icon, as Rajskub navigates the entertainment world against the backdrop of her own quirky idiosyncrasies.

At the beginning of Virginia Woolf's fantastical and satirical 1928 novel, Orlando is a young nobleman in Elizabethan, England. At the age of 30, Orlando awakens to have found he's now a woman. Moving through the following centuries, the novel stretches over 300 years, during which time Orlando meets several key figures of English literary history.

Brian Godawa, Hollywood screenwriter and novelist, explores the nature of imagination in the Bible. How God subverts pagan religions by appropriating their creativity and redeeming them within a Biblical worldview. Improve your imagination in glorifying God and defending the faith.

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!

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is an important actor in the American gun debate. While popular explanations for the group’s influence often focus on the NRA’s lobbying and campaign donations, it receives lesser attention for the mass mobilization efforts that make these political endeavours possible. On Target explores why the NRA is so influential and how we can understand the group’s impact on firearms policy in the United States.

From the Stone Age to the Greek Tragedies, from Shakespeare to Robin Hood, we have always had our heroes. The hero is at the centre of formative myths in every culture and persists to this day in world-conquering books, films and TV shows. But why do these characters continue to inspire us, and why are they so central to storytelling? Scalpel-sharp on the roots of storytelling and enlightening on the history and science of myth, The Hero is essential listening for anyone trying to write or understand fiction.

Steve Patterson's The Book of Letters I Didn't Know Where to Send is a collection of - wait for it - letters, written by award-winning stand-up comedian - you guessed it - Steve Patterson. The host of CBC Radio's The Debaters since 2007, Steve Patterson has become a household name, with more than 700,000 listeners tuning in each week. He has performed at several of the Just for Laughs prestigious televised galas, including one hosted by Steve Martin.

Unlock the transformative power of storytelling in business with this captivating audiobook bundle. Featuring two groundbreaking titles, this collection will equip you with the skills to craft a compelling brand story and harness the immense impact of storytelling to elevate your business to new heights. Within this audiobook bundle lies the key to unlocking the full potential of storytelling in your business.

The creators of the podcast The Dollop present profiles of the weird, outrageous, NSFW, and downright absurd tales from American history that you weren't taught in school. The United States of Absurdity presents short, informative, and hilarious stories of the most outlandish (but true) people, events, and more from United States history.

Improv instructor and writer Jorjeana Marie presents the first book to harness the creative power of improvisation exercises to help both aspiring and seasoned authors defeat writer's block and generate new ideas. Introducing the rules and techniques of improvisation as they apply to fiction writing, improv instructor and writer Jorjeana Marie addresses each major element of storytelling by applying writer's-block-busting games and inner-critic-quieting exercises to get the creative ideas flowing.

Flula Borg's fascination with America and its "peoples" have warmed hearts nationwide. A frequent guest of Conan O’Brien, the German-born actor and multi-talented entertainer (think Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat crossed with Billy Eichner) fell in love with the United States upon his first visit as a young boy. Throughout his career, he has succeeded in regaling audiences with stories from his outlandish travel exploits while paying homage to his German upbringing, culminating in a personality that is supercharged and charmingly wholesome.

When Mindy and her best friend, B.J. Novak, are approached on a dark street by a Charles Manson-esque character, naturally they’re unnerved. Turns out he’s a huge fan of The Office! Now Mindy’s feeling a little judgy. But the night is young, unseasonably hot, and getting weirder. Mindy and B.J.’s brief encounter with the drifter is about to take an unexpected turn in Sunset Junction.

Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.