Here are 100 books that Twice-Told Tales fans have personally recommended if you like
Twice-Told Tales.
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I am a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. Ever since I was a child growing up in the South Bronx, I have been interested in why people are so driven to believe they are right and good, and why there is so much prejudice in the world. This has led to me to a lifelong exploration of the basic motivations that guide people’s actions, and how these motivations influence how people view themselves and others, and the goals they pursue.
This is to me is the best book ever written for understanding what human beings are, how we are similar to and different from other animal species, how we develop from helpless newborns to fully functioning adults, and what we are striving for in our lives. Most nonfiction books make a point and then repeat it over and over with examples and anecdotes. In contrast, The Birth and Death of Meaning begins with evolution and progresses logically from its first page to its last. When you finish this book, you will have a much better understanding of yourself, the people in your life, historical and current events, and problems ranging from anxiety and depression to interpersonal conflict to prejudice.
My mother’s death from an E. coli outbreak over a decade ago was my wake-up call to an awareness of my own mortality and was the emotional foundation of both my first novel and my latest. I’ve reached a point in my own life where advancing age is a lived experience, and I’ve read broadly about this phase of life that goes largely unexamined despite the fact that we’re all destined for it. My essays have appeared in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. I’m a graduate of Denison University and Columbia Law School.
I read this book when it came out in the ‘70s, and I was in my mid-twenties, with only the most abstract, hypothetical awareness of my own mortality. It opened my eyes to the fact that our avoidance of thinking about our own deaths is not just an individual quirk of cowardice but a foundation of human culture and individual action.
To me, the latest popular manifestation of this avoidance is the current popular obsession with longevity, and this remains as current as the day it was published 50 years ago.
Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work,The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the "why" of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.
I am a Regents Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona. Ever since I was a child growing up in the South Bronx, I have been interested in why people are so driven to believe they are right and good, and why there is so much prejudice in the world. This has led to me to a lifelong exploration of the basic motivations that guide people’s actions, and how these motivations influence how people view themselves and others, and the goals they pursue.
This book summarizes the contributions of Otto Rank, the brilliant and influential psychoanalyst. Rank focused on two core psychological motivations, the desires for psychological security on the one hand, and for stimulation, growth, and creativity on the other. His work illuminates how these desires often work in concert but also often can be in opposition over the course of the lifespan, contributing to guilt, anxiety, and stunting growth. Rank’s analysis inspired the development of both existential psychology and humanistic psychology. Rank’s approach to psychological well-being is based on accepting and even affirming the limitations of life, understanding what you really want in life, and developing the will to move creatively toward achieving those goals so that one can live an authentic and satisfying life.
The Dark Backward is the story of the strangest case ever tried in a court of law. The defendant, who does not speak English or any other language anyone can identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed and charged with murder, rape, and incest.
I’m a former professional poker player and the author of a trilogy of books on poker behavior (aka poker tells). I have a psychology podcast called People Who Read People. I also do some independent research and writing: my research into online deception has been featured in the NY Times and Washington Post, and other places. I’ve been interested in psychology since I was a kid, probably due to my dad’s eclectic bookshelf that included a bunch of psychology and philosophy books.
This is a psychology book, maybe not what some would consider about “behavior,” and it’s a fairly heavy and dense one. But I feel I must include it as it has helped me understand human mental struggles more than any other book I’ve read. And a key part of understanding human behavior, especially the broader societal and political aspects, is understanding those dark, often under-the-surface struggles that we all deal with. It is the wisest book I’ve ever read, and I have bought it for many people. Yalom has become a sort of secular guru for me. It is that good.
Existential therapy has been practiced and continues to be practiced in many forms and situations throughout the world. But until now, it has lacked a coherent structure, and analysis of its tenets, and an evaluation of its usefulness. Irvin Yalom, whose Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy has rendered such a service to that discipline since 1970, provides existential psychotherapy with a background, a synthesis, and a framework.Organized around what Yalom identifies as the four ultimate concerns of life",death, freedom, existential isolation, and meaninglessness,the book takes up the meaning of each existential concern and the type of conflict that springs…
Ken began his career as an Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of North Carolina. After ten years in academe, he went to the Harvard Business School, following which he embarked on a 36-year career banking.
Ken worked at Shawmut Bank, Bank of New England, and from 1990 through 2019 at Silicon Valley Bank.
Mr. Wilcox earned a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard Business School, as well as a PhD in German studies Ohio State University.
He published Leading Through Culture: How Real Leaders Create Cultures that Motivate People to Achieve Great Things and soon he'll be publishing a second book One Bed Two Dreams: When Western Companies Fail in China.
People often ask themselves, why study literature. What’s the use?
This is the only book I have ever read that attempts to show how literature applies to leadership and management. The authors, one a professor of Shakespearian literature, and the other a management consultant, attempts to show how Shakespeare’s play contain practical lessons for leaders.
The chapter I liked most talks about how and why the CEO doesn’t always want their successor to succeed, and how they sometimes sabotage their successor’s success.
What Can Shakespeare teach us about effective leadership? Everything, according to John Whitney, leading professor at Columbia Business School, and Tina Packer, founder, president and artistic director of the critically acclaimed theatre group Shakespeare & Company. Whether we are dealing with an indecisive Hamlet or a corporate Lear, this innovative approach to management helps us tap into the timeless wisdom and profitable genius of the Bard. The issues fuelling the intricate plots of Shakespeare's 400-year-old plays are the same common yet complex issues that business leaders contend with today. John Whitney and Tina Packer compare Shakespeare's plays with management techniques,…
I am a Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, where I specialize in early modern drama (including Shakespeare) and book history. Since my undergraduate degree, I have been fascinated by historical drama, poetry, prose, and the often-porous boundary between ’truth’ and fiction during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of my research–including a major project on ‘Wartime Shakespeare’ that produced two books and a public exhibition at The National Army Museum in London–explores the profound impact of the stories we tell about the past and what they reveal about concerns and interests in the present.
This volume of essays about Shakespeare and historical drama catalyzed my doctoral research and my first book. It has been, without a doubt, the single most influential book on my research and early career as an academic.
The contributions are all distinctive, engaging, and carefully researched–and the volume offers an excellent introduction to the contexts of historical drama and writing ‘history’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, covering a wide range of plays and other primary texts.
It is often one of my top recommendations for students who are starting to work on historical culture. After each encounter with this book, my mind is still left brimming with ideas to explore.
This four-volume Companion to Shakespeare's Works, compiled as a single entity, offers a uniquely comprehensive snapshot of current Shakespeare criticism.
Brings together new essays from a mixture of younger and more established scholars from around the world - Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Examines each of Shakespeare's plays and major poems, using all the resources of contemporary criticism, from performance studies to feminist, historicist, and textual analysis.
Volumes are organized in relation to generic categories: namely the histories, the tragedies, the romantic comedies, and the late plays, problem plays and poems.
Each volume…
As a fiction writer, poet, essayist, and (now) a playwright, I am a staunch believer in applying the “Three Es” in all of my work in equal quantities: to entertain, to enlighten, and to educate. My passion to create stories has been ongoing throughout my life, courtesy of my love for the written word, cinema, and the theater, all of which have impacted and influenced my stories in amazing ways. My background and accolades as a writer and publisher are listed on my personal website, but it’s my life experiences and the books that I have recommended that helped me evolve as a storyteller.
Speaking as a playwright, this selection is a must. It not only contains all of the Bard’s plays, it also includes all of his beloved sonnets. His collected works not only serve as a foundation regarding dramatic structure and poetics, but his eloquence is fuel for any lover of the written word.
The Second Edition of this complete collection of Shakespeare's plays and poems features two essays on recent criticism and productions, fully updated textual notes, a photographic insert of recent productions, and two works recently attributed to Shakespeare. The authors of the essays on recent criticism and productions are Heather DuBrow, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and William Liston, Ball State University, respectively.
For me a story with richly developed non-humanoid aliens is mind-stretching. Much of modern Western culture starts with the ingrained concept that humans are at the top, whether by divine right or as the peak of evolution or whatever. Well-developed non-humanoid aliens—especially if they’re not super advanced or charmingly primitive—challenge this assertion. When that assertion topples, so do a lot of other preconceived notions. An abiding fascination in my work is for the “other,” from the wolves and Wise Beasts of my Firekeeper Saga (first book, Through Wolf’s Eyes) to expanding and exploring treecat culture with David Weber in the Star Kingdom book, and a lot in between.
A human, a robot, and an alien who has proudly adopted the name “Carnivore,” find themselves stranded on a planet that may have its own agenda—certainly, something must be behind the phenomenon dubbed “The God Hour.” Add in the journal of a possibly insane man who is known only as “Shakespeare,” and you have not only a wonderful adventure story, you have the foundation for examining what makes a person a person.
A human space traveler trapped on a remote planet must somehow unravel a confounding alien technology—or else surrender himself to a host of incomprehensible horrors
For thousands of years, Carter Horton has been traveling across the galaxy toward a distant world capable of supporting human life. At journey’s end, awakened from his millennia-long sleep by a curiously adaptive android, he is informed that his crewmates have all perished due to a system malfunction. But worse is yet to come: Horton’s sentient ship is refusing to return him to Earth, and a strangely cordial predator is waiting for him on the…
Fake news is not new. Biographies, in particular, are fraught with fallacies and fake stories. When fake news slanders individuals, reputations are ruined and lives destroyed. That’s what happened to Elizabeth Wydeville, Queen Consort to Edward IV, and mother of the two princes who disappeared during Richard III’s reign. When I discovered the slander that destroyed Queen Elizabeth’s reputation, I began a 5-year research project to set the record straight. Some fallacies are deliberate, originating in envy or power putsches. Others derive from historical laziness or incompetence. What I learned from my research has determined my choices of biographies, stories that tell previously unrevealed truths about individuals.
Critics argue that William Shakespeare did not write the works attributed to him because he lacked the knowledge of classical myth and history basic to his plots and imagery. Jonathan Bates proves that the curriculum of the grammar school in Stratford-on-Avon provided an education sufficient to explain Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Bate reviews books in English and Latin that Shakespeare would have read and that created his rhetorical brilliance.
I treasure Bate’s biography because my own background originated in a rural, agricultural setting outside the social and economic circles that usually produce academic types. Bates disproves the fallacy that only the privileged and elite can survive and thrive in life and careers.
“One man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”
In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It, Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before.
Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a…
I prefer to write historical fiction because so many fascinating stories have already happened in the past, and these tales are filled with real-life characters with rich backstories and personalities. I try to find the best historical figures and scenarios I can through exhaustive research and then stitch them together into thrillers that mesh seamlessly with the history I researched. My books are written to educate and entertain, and nothing makes me prouder than when readers follow the breadcrumb trails I leave behind for further research. I hope you enjoy the hunt!
De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem ["On the Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Books"] will likely catch you by surprise since, unlike most books featured on this website, this one was printed back in 1543. Fortunately, this means that anyone with a working Internet connection and web browser can access this mystifying medical atlas from the sixteenth century. Annotated editions of On the Fabric of the Human Bodyare available online from numerous medical colleges, so please take the time to find and appreciate this masterpiece of anatomy and artistic imagination.
This book, "De humani corporis fabrica libri septem", by A. Vesalius, J. Dalton, G. Hartenfels, is a replication of a book originally published before 1568. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible.
