MetaFilter posts tagged with stories

12 Beautifully Animated Stories of the Aboriginal Dreamtime

Effigy2000 — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:23:50 -0800

Dust Echoes is a series of twelve beautifully animated Aboriginal Australian dreamtime stories from Central Arnhem Land. The themes of these stories tell tales of love, loyalty, duty to country and aboriginal custom and law. Each story comes with descriptions on its history, what the story means and the text of the original story as told by local story tellers. Be sure to check out the downloads section for free desktop wallpapers and MP3 bonus tracks.

Detachable Penis Media

Artw — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 22:33:09 -0800

"Seed" - an anthology of short fiction published on a USB flash drive shaped like a penis. Sample story. More on the concept without pictures of plastic penises. (Safe for workness may vary)

Contemporary issues as handled by tv

Brandon Blatcher — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:41:52 -0800

TV and Parables of Our Times: Speaking of Faith ( a weekly radio program about "religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas") looks at how tv deals with issues in contemporary life. A link to the main episode (MP3) is on the page along with various support media.

Ghost Walk

emjaybee — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:21:01 -0800

The Infamous Witch. El Protector. Opryland. The Strange Case of Scenic Drive. Blogger Aunt B. of TinyCatPants uses Google Maps to link to the "locations" of her original Nashville-area ghost stories, one for every day of October. Link takes you to the map; start with "The Infamous Witch."

One in 8 Million

ocherdraco — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:06:52 -0800

One in 8 Million "New York is a city of characters. On the subway and in its streets, from the intensity of Midtown to the intimacy of neighborhood blocks, is a 305-square-mile parade of people with something to say. This is a collection of a few of their passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions. A new story will be added weekly." A photo and audio series from the New York Times. A few of the stories:

Fifty-Two Stories

backseatpilot — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 06:24:30 -0800

Fifty-Two Stories - one short story per week, for free. (via)

My prince has come - and gone

divabat — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 04:18:56 -0800

Fallen Princesses : Dina Goldstein explores what life might have been like for Rapunzel, Snow White, and others after happily-ever-after. (via)

A hundred words of awesome

dersins — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:02:49 -0800

Name Your Tale. Submit a title, and and one of the authors of Name Your Tale will write a 100-word short story based on the submitted title. For example, "Andrew Received Cancer."[via mefi projects]

Only Coon Hounds Are Allowed To Be Buried

netbros — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:38:53 -0800

American Houndsman is a site dedicated to showcasing vintage hound hunting. Back when hunters didn't have all the fancy equipment and gadgets of today, it was a time that hunting was simple. Fetch the dogs, the light, and the gun and off to the woods for a night's hunt. Features vintage photographs of beloved coon dawgs, even the ones still learning, and stories of hunting dogs in days gone by. There's even a coon dog cemetery where the best of the best are laid to rest. A group of solemn men, dressed in black mourning coats and hip boots, wearing carbide lamps on their heads stood beside a mound of soil and a freshly dug hole. A hunting horn sounded and the bay of hounds filled the air. Four similarly dressed men walked slowly toward the gathered crowd, a small wooden box carried between them. When the box was lowered into the ground one of the men spoke The Coon Dog Eulogy. He spoke with tears of fifteen years, how his dog and him traveled about His dog up and died, he up and died After twenty years he still grieves -- "Mr. Bojangles," by Jerry Jeff Walker

Storyreading

ocherdraco — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:06:55 -0800

A guide to Storyreading. "For over ten years now, various friends and I have been getting together on occasion to read stories aloud to each other. This activity—graced with the unlovely but utilitarian name "story reading"—can be a great deal of fun, but can also be rife with pitfalls of various sorts. This guide is an attempt to help others to run story readings. Note that reading stories is different from—and, generally, much easier than—telling stories; while people do occasionally tell stories at these gatherings (and it usually goes over well), that's not the primary emphasis...The origins of our approach to story readings are lost in the mists of antiquity. The idea may have sprung fully-fledged from a conversation I had with DH about a Delany essay called "On Pure Storytelling"; or it may've been derived from MK's reading The Princess Bride aloud, which in turn may've been inspired by folks at Yale who were doing much the same thing. Whatever the history, it's clear that other groups—notably one in Boston—have been having similar sorts of readings for at least as long as we have." Storyreading is essentially a bunch of people getting together and reading 8-10 page pieces, usually short stories (but also essays, or chapters from novels or nonfiction books). Want to start a storyreading group? Here are some places to find things to read:

A list of books read at the Yale group and its satellites
Literary journals: Glimmer Train, One Story, Ploughshares, and Zoetrope All-Story
Anthologies: The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American series, the Pushcart Prize Anthology
Collections of short fiction that have won the Story Prize
And, of course, the wonderful treasures of short fiction found by your fellow mefites

An addition to the advice given in the guide: it's nice to keep a wiki or other online list of the things your group has read, so you can go back and find them later. For flavor, some things recently read at my group include:

"A Signal in the Sky Said: Marry Her," by Ben Karlin, in the March 9, 2008 issue of The New York Times. Full text online here.
"The American Male at Age 10" by Susan Orlean, from The New Kings of Nonfiction, edited by Ira Glass
from Liberation by Brian Slattery
“All Seated on the Ground” by Connie Willis. Full text online here.
"My Affliction" by Gabrielle Bell. Self-published mini-comic later reprinted in Lucky Volume 2 #1.
"The Dubbing of General Garbage" from City Boy by Herman Wouk
from James Brown: Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk. Accompanied by the album.
from Celine Dion: Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson. Accompanied by the song.
"Excellent" from Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan
"My Uncle in the Garden" from Just An Ordinary Day by Shirley Jackson
from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
from The Elfish Gene: Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange by Mark Barrowcliffe
from Paper Towns by John Green

Science fiction stories in six words.

orthogonality — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:57:49 -0800

Science fiction stories in six words. Some by well known scifi authors. Click "Previous Articles" for earlier stories. For me, A.S. Byatt's is most haunting. A sub-genre of "Six Word Stories".

The Visual Telling of Stories

carsonb — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:53:36 -0800

The Visual Telling of Stories
A lyrical encyclopedia of visual propositions;
a visually orientated taxonomy of the ways in which pictures are used to tell stories. And we, spectators always, everywhere Looking at, never out of, everything ! It fills us. We arrange it. It decays. We rearrange it, and decay ourselves. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, the eighth elegy, 1922

Read me a story.

nickyskye — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:04:51 -0800

Something for a kid you know, or your own inner child. Speakaboos offers online stories with the written word below the illustrations, as if read from a book: fables, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, folk tales, lullabies. You can watch the stories without registering. You will have to sign-up (for free) for the future function of recording your own "that will allow kids and parents to record their own voices reading (or singing!) their favorite story, song, or nursery rhyme." Christmas stories. About the creators of the site. The readers of the stories.

The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine

Knappster — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:41:52 -0800

The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire Magazine via

Capucine tells a captivating tale

madamjujujive — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:04:32 -0800

Once Upon a Time - a filmed fairy tale starring baby monkeys lost in frightening trees, a witch, crocodiles, a tiger, a "popotamus" and a lion, and even a "tremendously very bad mammoth." (In French, English subtitles)

We were given a flicker of time in which an entire other life might be carried out, birth to death, as an exercise in paying attention, ....

orthogonality — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:58:16 -0800

Some strange and strangely compelling short-short stories (by a Mefite): Sometimes the sick got well, and sometimes they didn't. It was commonplace for my grandmother to inherit an entire estate, based on the words "All Left to Persis" scrawled across the back of an envelope.

Games that Never Existed

flatluigi — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 08:13:59 -0800

The Loneliness Engine and other invisible games.

A brilliant talent gone too soon. Breece D'J Pancake.

scarello — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 13:21:10 -0800

Transcripts of a troubled mind tells the life and times of Breece D'J Pancake, a brilliant young writer from South Charleston, West Virginia. In a raw, stripped down style, much of his work focused on the people and the language of the Appalachia He committed suicide at the age of 29 and left behind a small, but powerful collection of stories

The story of a cab ride.

Brandon Blatcher — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:41:36 -0800

The cab ride I'll never forget.

HUNGARIAN SHORT STORIES

Taksi Putra — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:01:02 -0800

HUNGARIAN SHORT STORIES

Rosenbaum, The Plausible-Fabulist

ninebelow — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 07:13:41 -0800

Like others before him Benjamin Rosenbaum is making his debut short story collection, The Ant King And Other Stories, available from his publishers, Small Beer, as a free download. More than this though, he is holding a competition to find the best derivative work inspired by it. These include "translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like." Benjamin Rosenbaum is not a character from The Scarlett Pimpernel, a poet or a writer of children's books as 'Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum' makes clear.

This is an intense love story.

divabat — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:25:31 -0800

How have you been burned by love?

No glove boning for me.

divabat — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:30:29 -0800

NYT asks: What's your recipe deal breaker? Deep frying? Requiring a helper? Standing overnight? Lifehacker readers chime in with the recipes that stop them cold.

"social problems of a somewhat mixed-up but dynamic, even brash, modernizing community"

amyms — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:59:18 -0800

From the Bookstalls of a Nigerian Market. Onitsha Market Literature consists of stories, plays, advice and moral discourses published primarily in the 1960s by local presses in the lively market town of Onitsha [in then-newly-independent Nigeria]... In the fresh and vigorous genre of Onitsha Market Literature, the commoner wrote pulp fiction and didactic handbooks for those who perused the bookstalls of Onitsha Market, one of Africa’s largest trading centers. Examples: How To Write And Reply Letters For Marriage, Engagement Letters, Love Letters And How To Know A Girl To Marry, Learn To Speak 360 Interesting Proverbs And Know Your True Brother, Struggle For Money [All full-text links are in pdf format, and some are quite large]. With links to additional resources.

City of Memory

tellurian — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:30:33 -0800

The Brooklyn Elite Checkers Club [flash] is just one of the stories on the recently released site, City of Memory - 'a public map that generates social interaction, personal expression, and collaborative storytelling'. Because it's so new it's a little short on content but in the future, when every street has a story, it should be all kinds of wonderful.