Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. This title offers both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. It uses literary concepts to ask social scientific questions: how do stories make life better, and when do they endanger it?
Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as the people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, the author recounts a collection of illness stories.
A book on the experience of reading Shakespeare's 'dark plays' which 'often begin with lives falling apart: an event-shipwreck, exile, doubt, or unexpected love-derails what had seemed secure. Those who participate in the plays, as players, audience members, or readers, are invited to see in those events the vulnerability of their own lives.