Transforming Tales: How Stories Can Change People

EBook Description: The power of story in our lives is far from adequately understood in contemporary culture. Equally the therapeutic power of storytelling, how it can quite literally entrance and even heal, has been ignored until recently. "Transforming Tales" reveals the true of impact of stories on our lives and how stories can create feelings of hope, take away psychological distress and even stimulate the immune system.Written by an experienced professional storyteller, this book contains over 90 short stories, from traditional fables to fascinating modern yarns, and allows readers to understand the hidden patterns storytellers use to captivate attention and learn how truths are often encapsulated in myths, jokes and fairy stories. The author focuses on the therapeutic value of stories and how they can instigate real change in people's lives. The book also reveals everything you need to know to create vibrant, memorable, original stories and short metaphors for yourself.This extraordinary journey into imagination and understanding will be an illuminating read for those professionally concerned with psychological and personal change and anyone who wants to learn more about the power and significance of stories.

While the lessons of surrealism have been pretty well assimilated by contemporary artists, the encyclopedic inclusivity of this selection, along with its global perspective and attention to women artists, provides plenty of surprises and new perspectives on this unconscious-driven movement. Renowned scholar and translator of French modernism Caws (The Eye of the Text, etc.), whose anthology Manifesto: A Century of Isms has just appeared (Forecasts, Feb. 19), makes her first, necessary act here to ignore what the rather dictatorial Andr� Bretonfounder, primary theorist and tireless proselyte of the movementdeemed "surrealist" in his time, and to include work that is not just "automatic writing" or collaborative in nature, the two types of writing Breton championed most. Memoirs, poems, fables, manifestos, games and collaborative works, as well as photomontages, paintings, drawings and odd, scandalous objects, are included by artists well-known and not: Giorgio de Chirico, Man Ray, Philippe Soupault, Hans Bellmer, Kay Boyle, the founders of "negritude" Aim� C�saire and L�opold S�dar Senghor, Salvador Dal�, Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, Michel Leiris, the underrecognized painter Dorothea Tanning (wife of Max Ernst), Mina Loy, Antonin Artaud, Leonora Carrington and Joseph Cornell make their appearances among many others. Because it leans more toward the painterlyi.e., imagistic and spasmodically creativeside of the movement and less toward the exacting political and philosophical side, the book can seem unfocused, and the lack of scholarly material, such as chronologies or biographic introductions, may leave one in the dark about the minor figures and how they fit in. But Caws's goal (as with Manifesto) is to present an active constellation of work beyond the canonizing and historicizing of the academy, placing the work back in the lap of the creative reader, in the here and now of the culture today. On that level, this anthology succeeds richly.

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