One of my favorite things in the world is Slightly Foxed: the Real Reader’s Quarterly. It’s a quarterly magazine, published in London, that features short essays written by people about books they ...

One of my favorite things in the world is Slightly Foxed: the Real Reader’s Quarterly. It’s a quarterly magazine, published in London, that features short essays written by people about books they ...

Your mind is the scene of the crime. Up until this point we haven't known anything at all about the plot of Christopher Nolan's new action movie Inception, besides that it's sci-fi and "set within the ...

If only there had been data mining around in Aristotle’s time. The Greek philosopher was one of the first to try to define how many different stories there are in the world. He believed that every ...

With some 130million books in existence, it's hard to fathom how the literary sphere's wealth of storylines could be boiled down into just six different categories. But a professor is now claiming ...

In his 1919 manual for screenwriters, Ten Million Photoplay Plots, Wycliff Aber Hill provided this taxonomy of possible types of dramatic "situations," first running them down in outline form, then ...

So what does Steven Spielberg's shark-fest Jaws have in common with the Old English epic Beowulf? And what do those two stories have in common with High Noon, The Guns of Navarone and most any James ...

Nearing a million views on YouTube is a four-minute clip of a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut. He draws two axes on a chalkboard: beginning to end, ill fortune to good fortune. When the hero rejoices, the ...

The seven basic plots are: overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; rebirth. Christopher Booker begins by establishing the endurance of these plots in ...