English Storytelling

As one of America's hottest female comedians, Lisa Lampanelli has earned critical acclaim across the country for her no-holds-barred style and ability to make people laugh at their own stereotypes and differences. Now, from the gutter-mouth comedienne who "talks like a truck driver but resembles a '50s housewife" (New York Times) comes her over-the-top, laugh-out-loud memoir, Chocolate, Please.

The 85% Man and Lessons from Lucille is Bob Mack Peak's well-crafted, uplifting, heart-felt, and romantic self-help epic. It's a lighthearted look at the differences between men and women. Peak strives to prove the well-known, open proposition that "Everything my mother told me about women is true... and I can prove it." The book's flowing narrative offers the reader a delightful journey toward discovering life's truest reward-unconditional love.

Remember the stories your grandfather used to tell you about way back when? Remember laughing out loud as the stories got deeper? If you like to LOL, then this really is a book for you. Here you'll find some observations on life in general and people in particular, as seen through a collection of newspaper columns, presenting skewed, offbeat, semiserious, and sometimes amusing views of the world.

Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing is hailed today as a significant literary work of Harlem Renaissance, though for several decades it, like all of her works, was out of print. As history rights a wrong and recommits Larsen’s name to memory, it is beneficial to look at the other writings she published over her short career, collected here in Beyond Passing: The Further Writings of Nella Larsen.

All children mythologize their birth... So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's beloved collection of stories, long famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale. The enigmatic Winter has always kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she summons a biographer to tell the truth about her extraordinary life: Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth remains an ever-present pain.

Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary.

When Stuever's narrative begins, he's standing in line with the people waiting to purchase flat-screen TVs at Best Buy on Black Friday, the opening of the Christmas shopping season. From there he follows a number of key residents of Frisco, Texas, as they navigate through the nativity and all its attendant crises.

The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.

Jake saw something unspeakable when he was nine. An act of violence. Brutal. He doesn't know it, but this trauma will play a key role in shaping him later in life. Now, he's 15. A wimp. He flinches. Always. He seeks the guidance of the biggest bad-ass he knows, his cousin Nick. Nick is a professional burglar and makes Jake his apprentice. Nick teaches Jake his dark philosophy - that there is no right or wrong in the world, just a series of events that happen without meaning. At first this helps Jake, but it also unleashes an aggression in himself he never thought possible....

Writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby co-created the all-star group of six superheroes in September 1963. From there, just three main writers chronicled Earth's Mightiest Heroes in that most turbulent of decades: Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, and Jim Shooter, each with differing approaches. The Avengers quickly became the pivot around which the Marvel Universe turned. To look back through its issues is to get a crash course in '70s pop culture.

In the last few decades, restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural presence. Chefs are heroes and thought leaders, well-executed entrées go viral, dining out has become theater, plating has become art and ubiquitous Instagram content. It explores the meaning we find in good food and warm hospitality. It shows why the restaurant offers unique opportunities to change the quality of our engagement with others and to create shared meaning across the table.

You need to know about this. They're calling it the biggest business skill of the next five years. To explain the abstract, or the complex, we need to use stories. This short Two-Minute Solution will give you practical, step-by-step ways to increase your effectiveness with stories tactically woven into your regular business writing.

Smiles and Cries is a book of life-affirming storytelling poetry that will move, inspire, motivate, encourage, and enlighten anyone, anywhere who has the opportunity to hear it. I truly feel that everyone who listens to this book will find that much of its content applies to them in their daily lives or that they can relate to most of its content in some way. If you enjoy hearing truly unique poetry, then this is one you don't want to miss!

I Don’t Want to Die Poor is an unforgettable and relatable examination about what it’s like leading a life that often feels out of your control. But in Michael’s voice that’s “as joyful as he is shrewd” (BuzzFeed), these razor-sharp essays will still manage to make you laugh and remind you that you’re not alone in this often intimidating journey.

Uninvited uses all the author’s skills as a veteran reporter, television producer, private investigator, archivist, and humorous storyteller to reveal the unseen capers, snafus, and mishaps behind Hollywood’s palace gates against a backdrop of America’s fascination with celebrity culture. And it exposes the personal struggles of an adrenaline-addicted gatecrasher facing perpetual moral challenges, physical dangers, and psychological stressors that culminate in near disaster.

Dr. P. J. Miller is back! Following his first installment, Cute Poodles, Sweet Old Ladies & Hugs, he has compiled another volume of truly awesome veterinary tales. Come along for the ride again as Dr. Miller delivers stories that feature colorful clients, endearing pets, his own beloved bulldog, and a hurricane. All the sassy hospital staff that listeners came to love are back, including that special staff member who seems to work by her own particular standards of professionalism (you know the one).

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.

Eager for a "doable adventure", Christopher Koch sets off on an impromptu 1,500-mile motorcycle trip down the Mississippi River from St. Paul to New Orleans in November 2014 - ill-equipped and underprepared as an unexpected Arctic air mass, the death rattle of a Pacific super-typhoon, washes over the American heartland. While meteorologists struggle for superlatives to describe the record-breaking cold, Koch pushes onward to overcome the weather, mechanical troubles, and his own hubris - and in doing so learns as much about himself as the hardscrabble landscape through which he rides.

Crowded in the Middle of Nowhere: Tales of Humor and Healing from Rural America is a collection of humorous and poignant stories from a veterinarian in a small, dusty farming and ranching community in rural West Texas. Dr. Brock gives you an intimate look into his small-town and big-hearted perspective on life, animals, and their owners. His unique perspective and tales of doctoring beloved pets, cantankerous livestock, and occasionally their owners will make you smile, laugh, cry, and evoke every other emotion under the sun.

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.