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.

This bundle consists of the following books: Modern Mandarin Chinese: The Routledge Course Textbook Level 2, 2nd edition (9781138101135) Modern Mandarin Chinese: The Routledge Course Workbook Level 2, 2nd edition (9781138101166) Modern Mandarin Chinese is a two-year undergraduate course for students with no prior background in Chinese study. Designed to build a strong foundation in both the spoken and written language, it develops all the basic skills such as pronunciation, character writing, word use, and structures, while placing a strong emphasis on the development of communicative skills. The complete course consists of the following books: Modern Mandarin Chinese: The Routledge Course Textbook Level 1 Modern Mandarin Chinese: The Routledge Course Workbook Level 1 Modern Mandarin Chinese: The Routledge Course Textbook Level 2 Modern Mandarin Chinese: The Routledge Course Workbook Level 2 Each level of the course consists of a textbook and workbook in simplified Chinese. A free companion website provides all the audio for the course with a broad range of interactive exercises and additional resources for students' self-study, along with a comprehensive instructor's guide with teaching tips, assessment and homework material, and a full answer key. Retaining its focus on communicative skills and the long-term retention of characters, the text is now presented in simplified characters and pinyin from the outset with a gradual and phased removal of pinyin as specific characters are introduced and learnt. This unique approach allows students to benefit from the support of pinyin in the initial stages as they begin speaking while ensuring they are guided and supported towards reading only in characters.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PICKED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, INDEPENDENT, IRISH TIMES, SPECTATOR, TLS, NEW STATESMAN, MAIL ON SUNDAY, I PAPER, PROSPECT, REVEW31 AND EVENING STANDARD AS A BOOK OF 2021 'A masterclass from a warm and engagingly enthusiastic companion' Guardian Summer Reading Picks 2021 'This book is a delight, and it's about delight too. How necessary, at our particular moment' Tessa Hadley ________________ From the New York Times-bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves - and our world today. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it's more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, "We're going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn't fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art-namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?" He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

THE PHENOMENAL INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'An anti-fascist history lesson disguised as a novel' New York Times 'Extraordinary' TLS 'The novel Italy has been waiting for. A masterpiece' Roberto Saviano A startling look into the fascist mindset, a portrait of unrelenting determination, and an impeccable work of historical fiction. M tells the story of the rise of fascism from within the mind of its founder. A gripping and masterful expose, it explores Benito Mussolini's rise to power and a movement that, amidst a failing democracy, came to shape the world. 'Panoptic and polyphonic, Scurati's book gives us the experiences of the fearful and the feared, the rhetoric of both the revolutionaries and the reactionaries ... an immense mosaic' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman 'An indisputable literary achievement ... Italo Calvino would have loved it' El Pais

American Boarding School Fiction, 1981-2021: Inclusion and Scandal is a study of contemporary American boarding-school narratives. Before the 1980s, writers of American boarding-school fiction tended to concentrate on mournful teenagers - the center was filled with students: white, male, Protestant students at boys' schools. More recently, a new generation of writers-including Richard A. Hawley, Anita Shreve, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Tobias Wolff-has transformed school fiction by highlighting issues relating to gender, race, scandal, sexuality, education, and social class in unprecedented ways. These new writers present characters who are rich and underprivileged, white and Black, male and female, adolescent and middle-aged, conformist and rebellious. By turning their attention away from the bruised feelings of teenagers, they have reinvented American boarding-school fiction, writing vividly about a host of subjects the genre overlooked in the past.