How did an American immigrant without a college education go from Venice Beach T-shirt vendor to television's most successful producer? How did a timid pastor's son surmount a paralysing fear of public speaking to sell out Yankee Stadium, twice? How did the city of Tokyo create a PowerPoint stunning enough to win them the chance to host the Olympics? They told brilliant stories. Whether your goal is to sell, educate, fundraise or entertain, your story is your most valuable asset: 'a strategic tool with irresistible power', according to the New York Times. Stories inspire; they persuade; they galvanize movements and actuate global change. A well-told story hits you like a punch to the gut; it triggers the light-bulb moment, the 'aha' that illuminates the path to innovation. Radical transformation can occur in an instant, with a single sentence; The Storyteller's Secret teaches you how to craft your most powerful delivery ever. In his hugely attended Talk Like TED events, bestselling author and communications guru Carmine Gallo found, again and again, that audiences wanted to discover the keys to telling a powerful story. The Storyteller's Secret unlocks the answer in fifty lessons from visionary leaders - each of whom cites storytelling as a crucial ingredient in success. A good story can spark action and passion; it can revolutionize the way people think and spur them to chase their dreams. Isn't it time you shared yours?

What is the essence of story? How does the storyteller convey meaning? Leading scholar Harold Scheub tackles these questions and more, demonstrating that the power of story lies in emotion. While others have focused on the importance of structure in the art of story, Scheub emphasizes emotion. He shows how an expert storyteller uses structural elements—image, rhythm, and narrative—to shape a story's fundamental emotional content. The storyteller uses traditional images, repetition, and linear narrative to move the audience past the story’s surface of morals and ideas, and make connections to their past, present, and future. To guide the audience on this emotional journey is the storyteller’s art. The traditional stories from South African, Xhosa, and San cultures included in the book lend persuasive support to Scheub’s. These stories speak for themselves, demonstrating that a skilled performer can stir emotions despite the obstacles of space, time, and culture.

Nearly four decades since its original publication, this book is still enhancing the revival of storytelling across the American landscape. Every person has a story

A celebration of words. An explosion of ideas. The joy of storytelling. From writers, translators and philosophers to storytellers, filmmakers and economists each of them wield the power of story to offer a glimpse into their art and craft, thoughts and ideas. Twenty one stimulating talks and essays that invite the reader to dip where they choose, to take the book's challenge where they please.

This is the first book-length study of Dreiser's short fiction oeuvre, comprising 31 stories. These include those collected in Free and Other Stories and Chains, and five uncollected ones. Most of them deal with the theme of success in American life and dramatize the excessive preoccupation with success, and the psychological tension experienced. Arguing for a serious consideration of Drieser, the novelist, as a skillful writer of short fiction, Griffin begins with an examination of Dreiser's theory of the short story and the circumstances that turned his interest away from newspaper work and toward artistic expression. He analyzes the publication and compositional history of each story and early reviews, and sets forth the layer patterns of theme and imagery unifying them. ISBN 0-8386-3217-5: $24.50.

From Word to Canvas: Appropriations of Myth in Women’s Aesthetic Production is an innovative collection of essays on female aesthetic production and myth, examining the ways in which women artists and writers utilize myth to negotiate their perceptions of feminine identity and feminine representation in an increasingly complex and culturally hybrid world. The featured essays and artistic contributions address a variety of contemporary female productions, including literature, performance, and visual art, in a markedly global scope. Representing a wide range of cultures, languages, geographic locales, and social contexts—from Jewish-Hindu and Kenyan-German, through Irish, Italian, American, to Vietnamese folktales—this diversified selection underscores the agency of “the feminine gaze” across a historical and geopolitical span, a gaze through which myths from various cultures and different cultural amalgams speak to us with force and with significance. The potency of this gaze is linked to the potential of myth simultaneously to encompass and compress history, and to offer the result as a backdrop against which the move from word to canvas—or from a mythic tale to its aesthetic appropriation—is performed in female aesthetic production.

Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) personnel are some of the most highly trained people in the military, with a job description that spans defusing unexploded ordnance to protecting VIP’s and state dignitaries. EOD are also one of the first military groups to work with robots every day. These robots have become an increasingly important tool in EOD work, enabling people to work at safer distances in many dangerous situations. Based on exploratory research investigating interactions between EOD personnel and the robots they use, this study richly describes the nuances of these reciprocal influences, especially those related to operator emotion associated with the robots. In particular, this book examines the activities, processes and contexts that influence or constrain everyday EOD human-robot interactions, what human factors are shaping the (robotic) technology and how people and culture are being changed by using it. The findings from this research have implications for future personnel training, and the refinement of robot design considerations for many fields that rely on critical small group communication and decision-making skills.

Annotation * Companion to the highly successful 'Tales for Trainers'

Storytelling for Virtual Reality serves as a bridge between students of new media and professionals working between the emerging world of VR technology and the art form of classical storytelling. Rather than examining purely the technical, the text focuses on the narrative and how stories can best be structured, created, and then told in virtual immersive spaces. Author John Bucher examines the timeless principles of storytelling and how they are being applied, transformed, and transcended in Virtual Reality. Interviews, conversations, and case studies with both pioneers and innovators in VR storytelling are featured, including industry leaders at LucasFilm, 20th Century Fox, Oculus, Insomniac Games, and Google. For more information about story, Virtual Reality, this book, and its author, please visit StorytellingforVR.com