What are you grateful for? What traditions hold special meaning for your family? What wisdoms guide your life? Whose story inspires you? This collection of nearly 100 personal stories will encourage readers to pause and reflect about issues that are truly meaningful in their lives. "30 Days" started as a blog during Ramadan sharing the personal stories of a Muslim family, but grew into an international storytelling platform that connects people of all backgrounds around things we universally value -- sharing kindness and doing good deeds, expressing gratitude and sincere wishes, cherishing traditions and wisdom from our elders. This handmade, commemorative, limited-edition volume, enhanced by exquisite artwork -- illuminations, miniature paintings, and calligraphy -- is intended to spark conversations between young and old, friends and strangers, and families of all traditions and configurations. After all, sharing stories helps us get to know each other better; it helps develop trust, build a connection, and start a friendship.

Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

This is the ultimate anthology of theatrical anecdotes, edited by lifelong theatre-lover Gyles Brandreth in the Oxford tradition, and covering every kind of theatrical story and experience from the age of Shakespeare and Marlowe to the age of Stoppard and Mamet, from Richard Burbage to Richard Briers, from Nell Gwynn to Daniel Day-Lewis, from Sarah Bernhardt to Judi Dench. Players, playwrights, prompters, producers—they all feature. The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes provides a comprehensive, revealing, and hugely entertaining portrait of the world of theatre across four hundred years. Many of the anecdotes are humorous: all have something pertinent and illuminating to say about an aspect of theatrical life—whether it is the art of playwriting, the craft of covering up missed cues, the drama of the First Night, the nightmare of touring, or the secret ingredients of star quality. Edmund Kean, Henry Irving, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren—the great 'names' are all here, of course, but there are tales of the unexpected, too—and the unknown. This is a book—presented in five acts, with a suitably anecdotal and personal prologue from Gyles Brandreth—where, once in a while, the understudy takes centre-stage and Gyles Brandreth treats triumph and disaster just the same, including stories from the tattiest touring companies as well as from Broadway, the West End and theatres, large and small, in Australia, India, and across Europe.

"A Book of Feasts and Seasons" recaptures the lost traditions surrounding major feasts and festivals--every occasion of the Christian Year.

"An odd but happy marriage of sociological observation and Gonzo-style adventure." -Wired Breaking news, fresh gossip, tiny scandals, trumped-up crises—every day we are distracted by a culture that rings our doorbell and runs away. Stories spread wildly and die out in mere days, to be replaced by still more stories with ever shorter life spans. Through the Internet the news cycle has been set spinning even faster now that all of us can join the fray: anyone on a computer can spread a story almost as easily as The New York Times, CNN, or People. As media amateurs grow their audience, they learn to think like the pros, using the abundant data that the Internet offers-hit counters, most e-mailed lists, YouTube views, download tallies-to hone their own experiments in viral blowup. And Then There's This is Bill Wasik's journey along the unexplored frontier of the twenty-first century's rambunctious new-media culture. He covers this world in part as a journalist, following "buzz bands" as they rise and fall in the online music scene, visiting with viral marketers and political trendsetters and online provocateurs. But he also wades in as a participant, conducting his own hilarious experiments: an e-mail fad (which turned into the worldwide "flash mob" sensation), a viral website in a month-long competition, a fake blog that attempts to create "antibuzz," and more. He doesn't always get the results he expected, but he tries to make sense of his data by surveying what real social science experiments have taught us about the effects of distraction, stimulation, and crowd behavior on the human mind. Part report, part memoir, part manifesto, part deconstruction of a decade, And Then There's This captures better than any other book the way technology is changing our culture.

The local history of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania is full of interesting stories about the intrepid souls who settled there, building the first towns and industries of the region. This is a well-researched and superbly composed chronicle which traverses various aspects of Schuylkill life. It begins with a profile of the German settlers who were the majority group who established themselves in areas of Penn State during the mid-1700s. We continue onto accounts of the initial settlements; essential matters include agriculture and an effective defense from aggressive Native American tribes. To better place the reader character profiles are given, describing certain people and the environs that surrounded them. As the decades went by, hamlets and villages grew into towns such as Pottsville. New industries were born and developed rapidly as the population burgeoned. The discovery of coal plus the advent of steam engines and the railroad led the economy of Schuylkill to prosperity. Churches were built to keep the locals mindful of the Lord, and schools were set up to educate the new generations. Amid all this activity, many intriguing stories and events ensued - together, these bring alive a distant era of grit, determination and hardiness.

Gossip and anecdote may be “idle talk,” but they also serve to knit together individuals in society and to provide the materials through which literary culture and historical memory are constructed. This groundbreaking book provides a cultural history of gossip and anecdote in traditional China, beginning with the Han dynasty and ending with the Qing. The ten essays, along with the introduction and postface, address the verification, transmission, and interpretation of gossip and anecdote across literary and historical genres. Contributors: Sarah M. Allen, Beverly J. Bossler, Jack W. Chen, Ronald Egan, Dore J. Levy, Stephen Owen, Graham Sanders, David Schaberg, Anna M. Shields, Richard E. Strassberg, Xiaofei Tian