Stories Of Ourselves

This series contains poetry and prose anthologies composed of writers from across the English-speaking world. Stories of Ourselves Volume 2 is a set text for Cambridge IGCSE®, O Level and International AS & A Level Literature in English courses. The anthology contains short stories written in English by authors from many different countries and cultures, including Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Christina Rossetti, Janet Frame, Jhumpa Lahiri, Romesh Gunesekera, Segun Afolabi, Margaret Atwood and many others. Classic writers appear alongside new voices from around the world in a stimulating collection with broad appeal.

The University of Cambridge Anthologies of Poetry and Stories. Stories of Ourselves is a set text for the Cambridge Literature in English courses at IGCSE, O Level, AS and A Level. The anthology contains stories by writers from many different countries and cultures.

This series contains poetry and prose anthologies composed of writers from across the English-speaking world. Parts of Stories of Ourselves Volume 1 are set for study in Cambridge IGCSE®, O Level and International AS & A Level Literature in English courses. Each short story in this collection has its own unique voice and point of view. They may differ in form, genre, style, tone and origin, but all have been chosen because of their wide appeal. Written in English by authors from different countries and cultures, the anthology includes works by Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, R.K Narayan, Janet Frame, Raymond Carver, Jhumpa Lahiri, Annie Proulx and many others.

This series contains poetry and prose anthologies composed of writers from across the English-speaking world.

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.

Throughout history we have told ourselves stories to try and make sense of our place in the universe. Richard Holloway takes us on a personal, scientific and philosophical journey to explore what he believes the answers to the biggest of questions are. He examines what we know about the universe into which we are propelled at birth and from which we are expelled at death, the stories we have told about where we come from, and the stories we tell to get through this muddling experience of life. Thought-provoking, revelatory, compassionate and playful, Stories We Tell Ourselves is a personal reckoning with life’s mysteries by one of the most important and beloved thinkers of our time.

One of the top ten books of the year at The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture/New York magazine A best book of the year at Los Angeles Times, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The New Yorker, Vogue, Kirkus An Indigo Best Book of the Year The acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, and illuminates the startling connections between diagnosis and identity. In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does. Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.

The two thought-provoking, extended essays that make up Stories We Tell Ourselves draw from the author’s richly diverse experiences and history, taking the reader on a deeply pleasurable walk to several unexpectedly profound destinations. A steady accumulation of fascinating science, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history—ranging as far and wide as neuro-ophthalmology, ancient dream interpretation, and the essential differences between Jung and Freud—is smoothly intermixed with vivid anecdotes, entertaining digressions, and a disarming willingness to risk everything in the course of a revealing personal narrative. “Dream Life” plumbs the depth of dreams—conceptually, biologically, and as the nursery of our most meaningful metaphors—as it considers dreams and dreaming every whichway: from the haruspicy of the Roman Empire to contemporary sleep and dream science, from the way birds dream to the way babies do, from our longing to tell them to the reasons we wish other people wouldn’t. “Seeing Things” recounts a journey of mother and daughter—a Holmes-and-Watson pair intrepidly working their way through the mysteries of a disorder known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome—even as it restlessly detours into the world beyond the looking glass of the unconscious itself. In essays that constantly offer layers of surprises and ever-deeper insights, the author turns a powerful lens on the relationships that make up a family, on expertise and unsatisfying diagnoses, on science and art and the pleasures of contemplation and inquiry—and on our fears, regrets, hopes, and (of course) dreams.