This book includes summaries and reviews of some of the 36 both best written and best acted movies I’ve seen. They have been rated 3.5 or 4 on 4 for their story, and 4 on 4 for acting. This selection represents 1.5% of all the horror movies I’ve covered as a critic. The films are sorted in chronological order. They are rated on five aspects: stars, story, creativity, acting, and quality. These are not for the squeamish. You have been warned!

In the context of ongoing or historical violence, people tell stories about what happened, who did what to whom and why. Yet frequently, the speaking of violence reproduces the social fractures and delegitimizes, again, those that struggle against their own marginalization. This speaking of violence deepens conflict and all too often perpetuates cycles of violence. Alternatively, sometimes people do not speak of the violence and it is erased, buried with the bodies that bear it witness. This reduces the capacity of the public to address issues emerging in the aftermath of violence and repression. This book takes the notion of "narrative" as foundational to conflict analysis and resolution. Distinct from conflict theories that rely on accounts of attitudes or perceptions in the heads of individuals, this narrative perspective presumes that meaning, structured and organized as narrative processes, is the location for both analysis of conflict, as well as intervention. But meaning is political, in that not all stories can be told, or the way they are told delegitimizes and erases others. Thus, the critical narrative theory outlined in this book offers a normative approach to narrative assessment and intervention. It provides a way of evaluating narrative and designing "better-formed" stories: "better" in that they are generative of sustainable relations, creating legitimacy for all parties. In so doing, they function aesthetically and ethically to support the emergence of new histories and new futures. Indeed, critical narrative theory offers a new lens for enabling people to speak of violence in ways that undermine the intractability of conflict

Management and Langugage explores and develops the image of the manager as one who is aware of, and attends to, the way in which language is used in everyday managerial activity. Much managerial activity is achieved through language and a vital task for any manager is to generate with others an intelligible account of the various feelings that surround the contested issues in the organization. Such a process involves reading a context from different perspectives, constructing new meanings, framing the complexities and dilemmas faced into new 'landscapes' of possible future actions, and creating a persuasive argument for those landscapes amongst those who must work in them. For such a process to be conducted successfully a range of abilities and skills become relevant such as storytelling, metaphors and developing arguments. Management and Language is a timely publication with contributions from eminent academics in the field. This book will be engaging reading to academics and management teachers interested in critical management theory and those generally open to new and different approaches to management. It will also be of relevance to practising managers who wish to have a deeper understanding of how they use language in their everyday work.

The challenge of life and literary narrative is the central and perennial mystery of how people encounter, manage, and inhabit a self and a world of their own - and others' - creations. With a nod to the eminent scholar and psychologist Jerome Bruner, Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience explores the circulation of meaning between experience and the recounting of that experience to others. A variety of arguments center around the kind of relationship life and narrative share with one another. In this volume, rather than choosing to argue that this relationship is either continuous or discontinuous, editors Brian Schiff, A. Elizabeth McKim, and Sylvie Patron and their contributing authors reject the simple binary and masterfully incorporate a more nuanced approach that has more descriptive appeal and theoretical traction for readers. Exploring such diverse and fascinating topics as 'Narrative and the Law,' 'Narrative Fiction, the Short Story, and Life,' 'The Body as Biography,' and 'The Politics of Memory,' Life and Narrative features important research and perspectives from both up-and-coming researchers and prominent scholars in the field - many of which who are widely acknowledged for moving the needle forward on the study of narrative in their respective disciplines and beyond.

Narratology has been conceived from its earliest days as a project that transcends disciplines and media. The essays gathered here address the question of how narrative migrates, mutates, and creates meaning as it is expressed across various media. Dividing the inquiry into five areas: face-to-face narrative, still pictures, moving pictures, music, and digital media, Narrative across Media investigates how the intrinsic properties of the supporting medium shape the form of narrative and affect the narrative experience. Unlike other interdisciplinary approaches to narrative studies, all of which have tended to concentrate on narrative across language-supported fields, this unique collection provides a much-needed analysis of how narrative operates when expressed through visual, gestural, electronic, and musical means. In doing so, the collection redefines the act of storytelling. Although the fields of media and narrative studies have been invigorated by a variety of theoretical approaches, this volume seeks to avoid a dominant theoretical bias by providing instead a collection of concrete studies that inspire a direct look at texts rather than relying on a particular theory of interpretation. A contribution to both narrative and media studies, Narrative across Media is the first attempt to bridge the two disciplines.