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.
posted by Brandon Blatcher on Nov 18, 2009 - 6 comments

Robert McKee’s Unconvincing Story
posted by Artw on Nov 14, 2009 - 78 comments

How to Tell a Story. "The humorous story is strictly a work of art--high and delicate art-- and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story--understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print--was created in America, and has remained at home." That Itchy Chick | You Should Have Seen The Old Man [more inside]
posted by Mike Buechel on Oct 11, 2009 - 17 comments

Fifty-Two Stories - one short story per week, for free. (via)
posted by backseatpilot on Jul 8, 2009 - 4 comments

They were in the stairwell that led down to the commode, a dangerous place in its time, the Grand Central Station Men’s, but for different reasons. I saw the dirt tracks leading there, and I left the monkeys in the chandelier and followed them. I kept to the tracks careful as I could. There were pits and corrugations everywhere in the old tile, any one of which could hide a man killing gob of explosive. At my back I heard Spot complain: “Leave ‘em be, Blacks. We’ve warned ‘em, ain’t we? If they blow themselves up, it ain’t on us.”

UXO, BOMB DOG by Eliot Fintushel (single-link short fiction)
posted by grobstein on Jun 15, 2009 - 15 comments

The Brazen Android by William Douglas O'Connor, is a 19th century science fiction story based on the myth of the Brazen Head, a steam-powered head that told fortunes. It's available as an audio book from the Internet Archives. (Via)
posted by The Whelk on May 19, 2009 - 18 comments

Kurt Vonnegut's perennial 1961 story "Harrison Bergeron" has been given a new film adaptation. (via)
posted by Joe Beese on May 13, 2009 - 68 comments

Real time Dracula "Experience Bram Stoker's Dracula in a new way -- in real time. Dracula is an epistolary novel (a novel written as a series of letters or diary entries,)" Whitney Sorrow is posting each entry in real time starting on May 3rd the date of the first diary entry. [via]
posted by Mitheral on May 4, 2009 - 27 comments

The Giving Tree (1973), animated short based on Shel Silverstein's 1964 children's story and narrated by the author. [more inside]
posted by the_bone on Mar 18, 2009 - 38 comments

The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist.
posted by chunking express on Mar 12, 2009 - 60 comments

The Invasion From Outer Space: Steven Millhauser gives The New Yorker a short, unsettling sci-fi story.
posted by The Whelk on Feb 10, 2009 - 111 comments

Make this Christmas special. Spend it in Ralphie's house! Bunny suit and Lifebuoy soap included. For an extra fee, the owner will convince you to lick a metal pole and then shoot your eye out. [more inside]
posted by miss lynnster on Nov 17, 2008 - 41 comments

The Loneliness Engine and other invisible games.
posted by flatluigi on Nov 10, 2008 - 19 comments

Boy meets girl, you know how it goes. The catch? They're made from Myriad Pro. This short TED talk by someone called Rives was cute, and whimsical enough to make me smile. [more inside]
posted by oxford blue on Nov 1, 2008 - 18 comments

Election woes: Or, why not to discount 26 year old lawyers.
posted by oxford blue on Oct 3, 2008 - 27 comments

"Political content aside, the discussion provided a lovely example of how a term from literary theory has established itself in American political discourse." via Language Log

"We may expect the following. Language will be carefully crafted. Advertisements will focus on personal narratives. The campaign will employ “attack” advertisements that emotionally sway voters. Policy will be sketchy with vague descriptions that emotionally satisfy Americans while offering scant details. The emphasis will be on creating narratives that resonate with the values, beliefs, and identities of prospective voters."
– Literary Gulag, on Lakoff, Nunberg, Westen, and the narrative of the 2008 presidential election. [more inside]
posted by iamkimiam on Sep 9, 2008 - 26 comments

Daniel Keys' classic 1959 Science Fiction story "Flowers for Algernon", which takes place in a series of diary entries, has been posted online as a blog. Of course, you'll need to read it backwards, from the earliest entry to the latest, to avoid giving away the ending... [via]
posted by Asparagirl on Aug 30, 2008 - 25 comments

Thirty New York city residents pooled their strength yesterday and hoisted a wrecked school bus into the air to rescue a pregnant traffic warden trapped beneath the five-ton vehicle. Donnette Sanz, the victim of yesterday's accident, could not be saved, but her son was delivered safely at a nearby hospital. [more inside]
posted by WCityMike on Aug 16, 2008 - 23 comments

Jerry Clower (Wikipedia article) started telling his funny stories to boost sales when he was a seed and fertilizer salesman. He went on to become a successful comedian and Grand Ole Opry star. [more inside]
posted by Daddy-O on Aug 7, 2008 - 16 comments

How have you been burned by love?
posted by divabat on Jul 28, 2008 - 41 comments

Kajima's floor-by-floor slow demolition is one of those rare things in life that leaves you truly speechless....After all, seeing the video of a 20-floor building submerging into the asphalt as if it was liquid is something that belongs to a sci-fi movie. [more inside]
posted by Pater Aletheias on Jul 15, 2008 - 30 comments

Blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah.
posted by LSK on May 16, 2008 - 60 comments

In 1974 - or 1976, depending who you ask - Armistead Maupin began writing "an extended love letter to a magical San Francisco” in the form of a serialized, fictional drama published originally in the Pacific Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, originally called "The Serial" which then became collectively known as Tales of The City. It is a suprisingly beautiful, deep, emotional, cosmopolitan and lasting tale about life in San Francisco in the turbulent, heady days of the 1970s and 1980s. Widely credited with and cherished for helping spread a little of the openess, tolerance and acceptance that San Francisco is now famous for. It then became a series of books - Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You - and lastly, the spin-off tale of Michael Tolliver Lives. Almost exactly twenty years after first publishing, it then became an excellent miniseries from the United Kingdom's Channel 4, which aired in the United States on PBS, but not without protest or limitations. [more inside]
posted by loquacious on May 4, 2008 - 39 comments

Paulo in London asks musicians to write him a story on an index card. [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Apr 15, 2008 - 7 comments

Over 2000 classic tales and fables including Aesop's Fables, Bulfinch's Mythology, Indian "Why" Stories, tales by Oscar Wilde, Beatrix Potter, Rudyard Kipling, Louisa May Alcott, L. Frank Baum and Harriet Beecher Stowe and stories about Abraham Lincoln, Robin Hood and Baron Munchausen. And more! The folk and fairytale collection is particularly rich, with hundreds of stories from all over the world.
posted by Kattullus on Apr 1, 2008 - 15 comments

Best Story Ever is a series of clips featuring various celebrities -- Henry Rollins, Lewis Black, Dee Snider, Chuck D, Ron Jeremy, Bret "The Hitman" Hart, and many more -- telling their best stories. Some are lame, some are funny. But hey, what's your best story ever? (It can't be lamer than Alan Thicke's, can it?)
posted by cog_nate on Mar 31, 2008 - 63 comments

The 21 Steps is a spy thriller short story that is told using Google Maps. [via mefi projects]
posted by brain_drain on Mar 20, 2008 - 20 comments

Canal Zone Images is a collection of stories and images about the Panama Canal Zone. Did you know that the construction workers were paid in gold and silver ('spiggoty' dollars)? "Paper money was not used on the pay car at all. In the first place, there was always a danger of its blowing away, and in the second place paper money in the hands of negro workmen soon assumed a most unsanitary condition." [more inside]
posted by tellurian on Feb 25, 2008 - 12 comments

The Wager: "I'll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today," posits game designer Steve Gaynor. Responses and rebuttals. [more inside]
posted by Pastabagel on Feb 19, 2008 - 140 comments

Kiuchi Nobuo - a Japanese airman in World War II, was captured and sent to a prison camp in the Ukraine. He tells his story with drawings.
posted by tellurian on Feb 5, 2008 - 23 comments

Best Buy Bodhisattva. [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Dec 19, 2007 - 74 comments

You should read these three stories by Amy Hempel. (Oh, and maybe listen to her read, here.) While you're at it, read some of these idiosyncratic but beautifully-written stories by grammarian Gary Lutz.
posted by dersins on Jul 30, 2007 - 19 comments

The world is one step closer to felix's trickle-charging story-telling bear.
posted by djb on Jul 27, 2007 - 13 comments

2BR02B is a short story by the late Kurt Vonnegut (so it goes) from 1962, brought to you now by Project Gutenberg.
posted by buriednexttoyou on May 4, 2007 - 17 comments

How To Talk To Girls At Parties by Neil Gaiman. Full text and reading by the author: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water on Apr 18, 2007 - 39 comments

The Addventures. Imagine the possibilities of an interactive web, but before Flash, before Java, before video plugins, before anything but text and graphics (and graphics take up so much bandwidth!). Addventures came out of this era, and over the years there have been quite a few (not all paths SFW) incarnations of the concept. You can even roll your own with open source. Can you find your old stories?
posted by mazatec on Mar 21, 2007 - 11 comments

Ficlets are extremely short stories (a maximum of 1024 characters). Other writers swoop in and write prequels and sequels to your ficlet, making interesting branching narratives a la Create Your Own Adventure.
posted by Plutor on Mar 15, 2007 - 13 comments

Esquire sends out 250 napkins to writers across America - from prolific novelists to those finishing off first works. Nearly a hundred respond back - from sex to frustration, poetry to twisted liaisons, even a mini book and plans for murder.
posted by divabat on Feb 27, 2007 - 22 comments

"Good People": A new short story by David Foster Wallace. New to Wallace? Like "Good People"? Read "Incarnations of Burned Children", a story with a similar sense of tension and dread. Want more? Okay.
posted by HerArchitectLover on Jan 31, 2007 - 25 comments

Tell a story in 5 frames is a Flickr "group" and nothing more. Not every folksonomy succeeds as well as this one. "ride of your life" is a classic.
posted by paulsc on Oct 13, 2006 - 15 comments

Sita Sings the Blues is a feature film (in progress) combining the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, the 1920's blues vocals of Annette Hanshaw, and classically informed but modern animation. The animator wanted to envision what the Ramayana would look like told through the eyes of its much loved and much maligned female character, Sita. This is not the first time the Ramayana has been retold from Sita's perspective, Sanctuary, a play by Hema Ramakrishna is a feminist reinterpretation that has garnered a lot of controversy. Retelling the Ramayana is part of the tradition.
posted by arcticwoman on Sep 24, 2006 - 7 comments

The Girl of Your Dreams. "Jesus had a dream girl. Jesus had a girl that He wanted to marry for several thousand years. But she treated him like shit."
posted by brownpau on Jan 19, 2006 - 29 comments

Alexei Sayle's writing for the Independent in the Motoring section. Occasionally it's about motoring, too! Also found was his "Imitating Katherine Walker" [html/pdf] and an excerpt from his book of short stories 'Barcelona Plates'. more inside
posted by Zack_Replica on Jul 30, 2005 - 10 comments

If Hemingway wrote A Visit from St. Nick. By Thurber, published all the way back in 1927.
posted by CunningLinguist on Dec 20, 2004 - 19 comments

The True Story of Audion This was surprisingly interesting and funny.
posted by chunking express on Nov 12, 2004 - 21 comments

101 years in 101 words
posted by Orange Goblin on Oct 19, 2004 - 14 comments

CRAZIEST = 311 points Scrabble can seriously affect your mental health. [Flash]
posted by lagado on Sep 22, 2004 - 36 comments

Two Years Before the Mast. "In the following pages I design to give an accurate and authentic narrative of a little more than two years spent as a common sailor,before the mast, in the American merchant service. It is written out from a journal which I kept at the time, and from notes which I made of most of the events as they happened." At the beginning of his third year of Harvard a severe attack of measles interrupted Henry Dana's studies, and so affected his eyes as to preclude, for a time at least, all idea of study. The state of the family finances was not such as to permit of foreign travel in search of health. Accordingly, prompted by necessity and by a youthful love of adventure, he shipped as a common sailor in the brig, bound for the California coast.
posted by weston on Sep 14, 2004 - 22 comments

The Shore, a short-story by Richard Ford.
posted by semmi on Aug 6, 2004 - 4 comments

Anacrusis is a collection of short stories. Very short stories, written under a strict length constraint. It's a perfect way to get your daily dose of weird, funny, thought-provoking fiction.
posted by wanderingmind on Jul 8, 2004 - 5 comments