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 ...

'The Seven Basic Plots' 'Why We Tell Stories' By Christopher Booker 728 pages. Continuum. $34.95. So what does Steven Spielberg's shark-fest "Jaws" have in common with the Old English epic "Beowulf"?

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 ...