About the Book: The famous novelist Orhan Pamuk has said – “I read a book one day and my whole life was changed.” StoryMirror has been instrumental in changing the lives of people by providing a unique platform for writers and readers alike. Storytelling or reading stories – transitions one into another realm, to explore various shades of human emotions. Each story teaches us something, makes us ponder and provides an opportunity for some soulful reflection. In this hectic and monotonous life, a storybook can help us dream, make us believe in fairies, keep us lively, give us hope and some stories can even give us the courage to deal with our day-to-day problems. It is rightly said by George Saunders, “When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.” It is a difficult task to choose a handful of stories from the plethora of interesting content on StoryMirror but the very best stories have been selected and brought to you by the means of this book. They are a result of the hard work and determination of promising writers. The writers have questioned their imagination and desire for writing and presented to us their most imaginative, engrossing, fascinating and gripping creations. This collection of short stories will provide an opportunity for the readers to access the best stories and also bear ample evidence to the vast corpus of work on the StoryMirror website. We hope it touches your heart and soul. Hope you have a great reading experience!

Narrative and Media, first published in 2006, applies narrative theory to media texts, including film, television, radio, advertising, and print journalism. Drawing on research in structuralist and post-structuralist theory, as well as functional grammar and image analysis, the book explains the narrative techniques which shape media texts and offers interpretive tools for analysing meaning and ideology. Each section looks at particular media forms and shows how elements such as chronology, character, and focalization are realized in specific texts. As the boundaries between entertainment and information in the mass media continue to dissolve, understanding the ways in which modes of story-telling are seamlessly transferred from one medium to another, and the ideological implications of these strategies, is an essential aspect of media studies.

You are invited to "Dancing Along the Needle’s Thread" with Ellen as she sews the fabric of her life together with a rich array of colourful strands. Inspired by her desire for learning and self-understanding, she weaves a personal tapestry with her mother's harrowing story during wartime Germany and her own challenges and triumphs experienced as a middle-age mother diving into university education in Canada. Leaping forward with insights from her doctoral thesis, Ellen creates another "Gesamtkunstwerk"— a work encompassing a diversity of art forms— to explore the nature of Self. Drawing on dance, drama, mythology, art, poetry, literature, and journals, she rediscovers the joy of expressing her truth later in life. Supported once again by the five-movement framework of Hector's Berlioz's "Fantastic Symphony," she embarks on this new journey accompanied by the imagined personifications of Berlioz, Lewis Carroll, and characters from "Alice in Wonderland." Together, we discover an end is a beginning, and meaning is found in their interwoven threads, as Ellen dips into her storied life not only in pursuit of self-knowledge but also on a mission to realize her potential by helping you find yours.

divIn Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.” Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped./DIV

In this evocative memoir, traversing more than three decades, the author recounts a life moulded through his experiences as a refugee, and then cab driver, and finally, the domain of academia as a professor in Norway. Much ink has been spilled, and careers - both academic and political - piggybacked, on writing about refugees, non-western minorities, integration, and the purported threat they face to western culture. Seldom are refugees given a voice to articulate their own perspectives. This memoir is the voice of the subaltern inspired by the postcolonial genre of the empire writing back. Personal reflections are intertwined with critical analysis in offering a distinctive outlook on the challenges and successes confronting people of colour. On a deeper level, the memoir is crafted as a "no holds barred" navigational tool for minoritized youth caught in the crossfire of political and social skullduggery. "A Somali-Norwegian Saga: My Journey from Refugee to Cab Driver to Professor", weaves sociological theories into the narrative and serves as a call to broaden and accommodate new and emerging hybrid identities in what has been called the "browning" of the western demographic, openly addresses the conflicts posed by certain minority cultural practices misaligned with universal democratic ideals, and ultimately suggests that success is within reach despite the enormous hurdles. It is a tribute to the fortitude and resilience of countless, nameless refugees who took on the challenges of being outsiders and enriched the diverse fabric of Norwegian society.

In this provocative study of eight novels, Karen E. Beardslee asserts that American writers often engage with folk traditions as a necessary part of their characters journeys to wholeness. Focusing not only on African American, Native American, and Hispanic American cultures but also on women s culture, Beardslee traces the connections between folk legacies and the search for selfhood in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. Within each chapter, a novel by a contemporary author and one from an earlier period are brought together: Whitney Otto s How to Make an American Quilt and Harriet Beecher Stowe s The Minister s Wooing; David Bradley s The Chaneysville Incident and Charles Chesnutt s The Conjure Woman; Leslie Marmon Silko s Ceremony and Zitkala-Sa s American Indian Stories; and Roberta Fernandez s Intaglio and Maria Cristina Mena s The Birth of the God of War. These pairings are not based on matters of intertextuality or influence but are chosen according to the folk groups to which the novels characters belong. This strategy enables Beardslee to trace the particular legacies that inform the work of the twentieth-century authors. As Beardslee notes, contemporary texts and the critical commentary on them have focused, until fairly recently, on the search for self in male (usually white) characters. Such works have also positioned that search outside the character s family or community and have usually emphasized its futility. With the growing shift toward multiculturalism in fiction, however, folk traditions have come to play an increasingly crucial role in characters journeys to self-awareness as well as in the success of those journeys. Thoroughly researched and cogently argued, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of both folklore and literature as it explores the relationship between knowing one s cultural heritage and achieving a sense of self that is whole instead of fragmented, connected instead of drifting. The Author: Karen E. Beardslee teaches in the Department of Language and Literature at Burlington County College in Pemberton, New Jersey. Her articles have appeared in MELUS, The Encyclopedia of Folklore and Literature, and the Zora Neale Hurston Forum. "