SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'If you want to write a novel or a script, read this book' Sunday Times 'The best book on the craft of storytelling I've ever read' Matt Haig 'Rarely has a book engrossed me more, and forced me to question everything I've ever read, seen or written. A masterpiece' Adam Rutherford Why stories make us human and how to tell them better. There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story - but few have used a scientific approach. In this incisive, thought-provoking book, award-winning writer Will Storr demonstrates how master storytellers manipulate and compel us. Applying dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to the foundations of our myths and archetypes, he shows how we can use these tools to tell better stories - and make sense of our chaotic modern world. INCLUDES NEW MATERIAL.

David J. Leigh explores the innovative influences of the Book of Revelation and ideas of an end time on fiction of the twentieth century, and probes philosophical, political, and theological issues raised by apocalyptic writers from Walker Percy, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams to Doris Lessing, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo. Leigh tackles head on a fundamental question about Christian-inspired eschatology: Does it sanction, as theologically sacred or philosophically ultimate, the kind of "last battles" between good and evil that provoke human beings to demonize and destroy the other? Against the backdrop of this question, Leigh examines twenty modern and postmodern apocalyptic novels, juxtaposing them in ways that expose a new understanding of each. The novels are clustered for analysis in chapters that follow seven basic eschatological patterns-the last days imagined as an ultimate journey, a cosmic battle, a transformed self, an ultimate challenge, the organic union of human and divine, the new heaven and new earth, and the ultimate way of religious pluralism. For religious novelists, these patterns point toward spiritual possibilities in the final days of human life or of the universe. For more political novelists-Ralph Ellison, Russell Hoban, and Salman Rushdie among them-the patterns are used to critique political or social movements of self-destruction. Beyond the twenty novels closely analyzed, Leigh makes pertinent reference to many more as well as to reflections from theologians Jurgen Moltmann, Zachary Hayes, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Paul Ricoeur. Both a guidebook and a critical assessment, Leigh's work brings theological concepts to bear on end-of-the-world fiction in an admirably clear and accessible manner.

HONORABLE MENTION, HARRY SHAW AND KATRINA HAZZARD-DONALD AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING WORK IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE STUDIES, GIVEN BY THE POP CULTURE ASSOCIATION A view of transatlantic slavery's afterlife and modern Blackness through the lens of age Although more than fifty years apart, the murders of Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin share a commonality: Black children are not seen as children. Time and time again, excuses for police brutality and aggression-particularly against Black children- concern the victim "appearing" as a threat. But why and how is the perceived "appearance" of Black persons so completely separated from common perceptions of age and time? Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life posits age, life stages, and lifespans as a central lens through which to view Blackness, particularly with regard to the history of transatlantic slavery. Focusing on Black literary culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Habiba Ibrahim examines how the history of transatlantic slavery and the constitution of modern Blackness has been reimagined through the embodiment of age. She argues that Black age-through nearly four centuries of subjugation- has become contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. As a result, rather than the number of years lived or a developmental life stage, Black age came to signify exchange value, historical under-development, timelessness, and other fantasies borne out of Black exclusion from the human. Ibrahim asks: What constitutes a normative timeline of maturation for Black girls when "all the women"-all the canonically feminized adults-"are white"? How does a "slave" become a "man" when adulthood is foreclosed to Black subjects of any gender? Black Age tracks the struggle between the abuses of Black exclusion from Western humanism and the reclamation of non-normative Black life, arguing that, if some of us are brave, it is because we dare to live lives considered incomprehensible within a schema of "human time."

The Spatial Practices series is premised on the observation that places are inscribed with cultural meaning, not least of all in terms of collective constructions of identity. Such space-based constructions can manifest in material and immaterial, explicit and implicit forms of heritage, and they are crucial factors in the promotion of a group's wellbeing. It is this intersection of spaces, heritage and wellbeing that the present volume takes at its object. It considers ways in which institutional spaces in their materiality as well as in their cultural inscriptions impact on the wellbeing of the subjects inhabiting them and explores how heritage comes to bear on these interrelations within specific institutions, such as prisons, hospitals or graveyards.

Visions of the Buddha offers a ground-breaking approach to the nature of the early discourses of the Buddha, the most foundational scriptures of Buddhist religion. Although the early discourses are commonly considered to be attempts to preserve the Buddha's teachings, Shulman demonstrates that these texts are full of creativity, and that their main aim is to beautify the image of the wonderous Buddha. While the texts surely care for the early teachings and for the Buddha's philosophy or his guidelines for meditation, and while at times they may relate real historical events, they are no less interested in telling good stories, in re-working folkloric materials, and in the visionary contemplation of the Buddha in order to sense his unique presence. The texts can thus be, at times, a type of meditation. Eviatar Shulman frames the early discourses as literary masterpieces that helped Buddhism achieve the wonderful success it has obtained. Much of the discourses' masterful storytelling was achieved through a technique of composition defined here as the play of formulas. In the oral literature of early Buddhism, texts were composed of formulas, which are repeated within and between texts. Shulman argues that the formulas are the real texts of Buddhism, and are primary to full discourses. Shaping texts through the play of formulas balances conservative and innovative tendencies within the tradition, making room for creativity within accepted forms and patterns. The texts we find today are thus versions-remnants-chosen by history of a much more vibrant and dynamic creative process.

Doing Justice to a Wronged Literature is a Festschrift for the Arabist and Islamicist Thomas Bauer. It includes 17 essays by established academics on various themes and aspects of Arabic literature and rhetoric of the Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman periods (12th-18th centuries). Notoriously neglected and maligned by earlier scholarship, Arabic literature and rhetoric of the 12th-18th centuries is an understudied area of Arabic studies that Thomas Bauer has over the last two decades succeeded in developing and promoting. A tribute to his pioneering work on this field, the contributions highlight the wealth, complexity and importance of Arabic literature and rhetoric of the said period by offering close readings of paradigmatic texts or examining specific topics and trends in larger corpora.

This book is an investigation of the widely overlooked photographic style of pictorialism in the American West between 1900 and 1950 and argues that western pictorialist photographers were regionalists that had their roots in the formidable photographic heritage of the nineteenth-century West. Driven by a wealth of textual and visual primary sources, the book addresses the West's relationship with the eastern centers of art in the early century, the diversity of practitioners such as women, Japanese Americans, Indigenous Americans, western rural workers, etc., and the style's final demise as it related to the modernism of Group F.64. Couched in the rhetoric of regionalism; it is a refreshing and innovative approach to an overlooked wealth of American cultural production.

Casuistry and Early Modern Spanish Literature examines a neglected yet crucial field: the importance of casuistical thought and discourse in the development of literary genres in early modern Spain. Faced with the momentous changes wrought by discovery, empire, religious schism, expanding print culture, consolidation of legal codes and social transformation, writers sought innovation within existing forms (the novella, the byzantine romance, theatrical drama) and created novel genres (most notably, the picaresque). These essays show how casuistry, with its questioning of example and precept, and meticulous concern with conscience and the particularities of circumstance, is instrumental in cultivating the subjectivity, rhetorical virtuosity and spirit of inquiry that we have come to associate with the modern novel.

During a remarkable lifetime, Andrew Sinclair has bridged the worlds of university and literature, art and cinema. A child of the Second World War, he has known many of the leading figures of the past seventy years - ranging from William Golding to Ted Hughes, Harold Pinter to Francis Bacon, Robert Lowell to Graham Greene, as well as publishing such classic screenplays as 'The Blue Angel', 'The Third Man' and 'Stagecoach'. He also directed a number of films including Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood' starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O'Toole. This unique `anti-memoires' of episodes and encounters captures new insights into many of the leading creative talents and stars of their times. In his own adventures, Andrew became involved in the revolt against the Suez invasion and overground nuclear tests, the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the 1968 global student uprisings and finally in the worldwide digital revolution in education and the arts. Now in his ninth decade, this author of some 40 books, including the much-lauded The Breaking of Bumbo and Gog, Andrew Sinclair in the tradition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives looks back on a rich life and fond memories of the people he has studied and known.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

The era known as the Thaw (1953-64) was a crucial period in the history of the Soviet Union. It was a time when the legacies of Stalinism began to unravel and when brief moments of liberalisation saw dramatic changes to society. By exploring theatre productions, plays and cultural debates during the Thaw, this book sheds light on a society in flux, in which the cultural norms, values and hierarchies of the previous era were being rethought. Jesse Gardiner demonstrates that the revival of avant-garde theatre during the Thaw was part of a broader re-engagement with cultural forms that had been banned under Stalin. Plays and productions that had fallen victim to the censor were revived or reinvented, and their authors and directors rehabilitated alongside waves of others who had been repressed during the Stalinist purges. At the same time, new theatre companies and practitioners emerged who reinterpreted the stylized techniques of the avant-garde for a post-war generation. This book argues that the revival of avant-garde theatre was vital in allowing the Soviet public to reimagine its relationship to state power, the West and its own past. It permitted the rethinking of attitudes and prejudices, and led to calls for greater cultural diversity across society. Playwrights, directors and actors began to work in innovative ways, seeking out the theatre of the future by re-engaging with the proscribed forms of the past.