Life is stories, man. Telling stories. Listening to stories. One day, somebody had the brilliant idea to start writing these stories down. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. Trading yarns. Figuring things out. Reading and writing. I wrote my first story in middle school. My first novel in college. My first published novel (This Way Madness Lies) in my late twenties. Now it’s thirty years, twenty-five novels, fifty short stories, and three books of poetry later, and I’m still as obsessed with and passionate about storytelling as I was as a young buck backpacking around Europe with a notebook and a beat-up copy of Down and Out in London and Paris stuffed into my leather satchel.
My podcast is
The Ten-Minute Storyteller Podcast
Attention spans are shrinking, stimuli expanding. Storytellers, if they choose, can moan and groan, complain and whine. Or, we can adapt. Evolve. Get out on the road from long mind-numbing narratives to short, snappy oral storytelling.
The Ten-Minute Storyteller endeavors to entertain its listeners with tall tales rendered swiftly and with the utmost empathy. We here at The Ten-Minute Storyteller pledge to pack as much entertainment, emotion, and exploration into the Human Condition as ten minutes will permit. Think mini novels. On steroids.
I first discovered this book as a kid in my early twenties. It was the first novel to really blow my mind, to make me realize just how powerful the written word could be, how simple words on a page could so entirely engage the senses. It was, I tell you, an epiphany.
Loggers in Oregon. A union strike. A stubborn, independent family. Nothing was complex about the plot, but the characters stepped out of the book and wandered around my bedroom like I’d taken hallucinogens. Their attitudes and emotions poured out from between the covers. The growl of chainsaws filled my ears, and the smell of gasoline filled my nostrils. Grease and woodchips somehow found their way under my fingernails.
The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sailor Song is a wild-spirited and hugely powerful tale of an Oregon logging clan.
A bitter strike is raging in a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers: Henry, the fiercely vital and overpowering patriarch; Hank, the son who has spent his life trying to live up to his father; and Viv, who fell in love with Hank's exuberant machismo but now finds it wearing thin. And then there is Leland, Henry's bookish younger…
Not long after reading Sometimes A Great Notion, I found myself in El Salvador on assignment. A colleague gave me a dogeared copy of this book. For the second time, a book, a novel, or a story imagined in an author’s soul and brain blew my mind. Blew it this time to smithereens.
All these years later, I still haven’t fully recovered.
Every page, practically every sentence, is filled with miracles. Miracles of invention. Miracles of inspiration. Miracles of the human heart. Several readings are in, and I still marvel at the audacity of the thing and wonder just how the hell Marquez ever did it. A journalist at the time, after that first reading I vowed to grapple with my imagination and turn my meager talents to fiction.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.
And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the first novel ever written. It may also be the greatest novel ever written. Adventure. Humor. Pathos. Crazy amounts of imagination. The Whole Damn Human Condition.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.
I’m the youngest of six sons. Our father read this book aloud to each of us. By the time I came along, he’d had lots of practice. He had distinct voices for all the characters. I can still hear him doing Jim’s voice after Jim gets whacked by the rattlesnake. I had nightmares for a week.
Your grasp of reality is altered when you read Huck Finn as a kid. Twain sweeps you out onto the Mississippi, where you mentally, emotionally, and physically, yes, physically, endure the journey with Huck and Jim.
I didn’t realize until I read the novel years later that this book was the first to blow my mind. And what was I? Nine? Maybe ten?
Thanks, Dad!
I spent many years without a work of fiction blowing my mind. A few came close, but nothing that altered my reality or changed my perspective, like the books I’ve mentioned above. But then, quite by accident, I stumbled upon Abbey’s wild, free-ranging, anarchist tale of corporate sabotage in the American Southwest.
I’d heard about the book years earlier when it first appeared, but I had never read it. Until Audible promoted it as a sales book, I loaded it onto my iPhone for two bucks—$ 1.99: The best I ever spent.
Times are even crazier now than they were back in the 70s when Abbey penned this book. Read it. Absorb it. Live it. Be changed by it. Let your mind be blown.
'Revolutionary ... An extravagant, finely written tale of ecological sabotage' The New York Times
Audacious, controversial and hilarious, The Monkey Wrench Gang is Edward Abbey's masterpiece - a big, boisterous and unforgettable novel about freedom and commitment that ignited the flames of environmental activism.
Throughout the vast American West, nature is being vicitimized by a Big Government / Big Business conspiracy of bridges, dams and concrete. But a motley gang of individuals has decided that enough is enough. A burnt-out veteran, a mad doctor and a polygamist join forces in a noble cause: to dismantle the machinery of progress through…
Attention spans are shrinking, stimuli expanding. Storytellers, if they choose, can moan and groan, complain and whine. Or, we can adapt. Evolve. Get out on the road from long mind-numbing narratives to short, snappy oral storytelling.
The Ten-Minute Storyteller endeavors to entertain its listeners with tall tales rendered swiftly and with the utmost empathy. We here at The Ten-Minute Storyteller pledge to pack as much entertainment, emotion, and exploration into the Human Condition as ten minutes will permit. Think mini novels. On steroids.
I’ve become passionate about telling parents how to raise happy, resilient, creative, confident, entrepreneurial children who are doing something that gives them joy. So many young people are unhappy; parents don’t understand how to help. They think their children should follow their path, but that no longer works for many. For the last 10 years, I’ve been speaking to parent groups; I was an Advisor to EQ Generation, an after-school program that gives children the skills to succeed; on the Advisory Board of MUSE School, preparing young people with passion-based learning; and on the Board of Spark the Journey, mentoring low-income high school students to achieve college and career success.
This book shakes longstanding assumptions of parenting.
Through 99 stories of people who are now changing the world, it shows how to raise creative, confident, resilient children who are filled with joy and purpose. Based on interviews with top entrepreneurs and their parents, it guides you to help your children identify their passion and figure out how they can spend their professional lives doing something they love.
Parents' well-intentioned efforts often boomerang. By ignoring their children’s skills and interests, parents can inadvertently create pressure and anxiety, thwarting their children's ability to excel and find happiness. Too often, following your heart…
Raising an Entrepreneur: How to Help Your Children Achieve Their Dreams - 99 Stories from Families Who Did
Learn how successful entrepreneurs were raised! Could your children start a company that disrupts existing industries? Or a non-profit that helps people around the world? Or follow their passion as an artist or activist? And most important, lead a life of joy and purpose, to be happy and fulfilled? Margot Machol Bisnow, mother of two thriving entrepreneurs, reveals how to raise creative, confident, resilient, fearless kids who achieve their dreams, through 99 stories of families who did it.
Read stories from 70 families who raised true game changers. See family photos of these thriving entrepreneurs, both when they were young…
