Deborah Schiffrin is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. She is the author of In Other Words: Variation in Reference and Narrative. Anna De Fina is an associate professor in the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. She is the author of Identity in Narrative: A Study of Immigrant Discourse. Anastasia Nylund is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University.

• IntroductionDeborah Schiffrin and Anna De Fina 1. Where Should I Begin? William Labov, University of Pennsylvania 2. The Remediation of Storytelling: Narrative Performance on Early Commercial Sound RecordingsRichard Bauman, Indiana University3. Narrative, Culture, and MindJerome Bruner, New York University4. Positioning as a Metagrammar for Discursive Story LinesRom Harre, London School of Economics and Political Science/Georgetown University5. "Ay Ay Vienen Estos Juarenos": On the Positioning of Selves through Code Switching by Second-Generation Immigrant College StudentsAlan D. Hansen, Luke Moissinac, Cristal Renteria, and Eliana Razo 6. A Tripartite Self-Construction Model of IdentityLeor Cohen 7. Narratives of Reputation: Layerings of Social and Spatial IdentitiesGabriella Modan and Amy Shuman 8. Identity Building through Narratives on a Tulu Call-in TV ShowMalavika Shetty 9. Blank Check for Biography? Openness and Ingenuity in the Management of the "Who-Am-I-Question" and What Life Stories Actually May Not Be Good For YouMichael Bamberg 10. Reflection and Self-Disclosure from the Small Stories Perspective: A Study of Identity Claims in Interview and Conversational DataAlexandra Georgakopoulou 11. Negotiating Deviance: Identity, Trajectories and Norms in a Graffitist's Interview NarrativeJarmila Mildorf 12. Interaction and Narrative Structure in DementiaLars Christer Hyden and Linda Orulv 13. Concurrent and Intervening Actions during Storytelling in Family "Ceremonial" DinnersJenny Mandelbaum 14. Truth and Authorship in Textual TrajectoriesIsolda E. Carranza 15. Legitimation and the Heteroglossic Nature of Closing ArgumentsLaura Felton Rosulek 16. Multimodal Storytelling and Identity Construction in Graphic NarrativesDavid Herman 17. The Role of Style Shifting in the Functions and Purposes of Storytelling: Detective Stories in AnimeFumiko Nazikian

Every chapter in the book raises interesting and critical issues about how theorists and researchers are to identify, understand and delimit the complex, transactional event(s) they purport to study and report on. Telling Stories: Language, Narrative, and Social Life is an extremely engaging collection of diverse papers that I would highly recommend to anyone doing or considering doing research involving narrative, discourse analysis or text anaylsis. The individual chapters in this book are fully worth reading independently, and taken as a collection interconnected by the three underlying themes, the book itself is a valuable contribution to the field of narrative research and discourse analysis. Discourse Studies