The stories we tell about ourselves and our communities. This is a book about stories created in imaginary play and the way they impact upon our lives. From childhood we learn about ourselves from the stories other people tell us and the stories we tell about ourselves. From these stories we begin to form our identity and a sense of self. Some of these stories make us proud and strong in the sense of who we are, but this is not always so.

Macbeth extolled “sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,” in Shakespeare’s great tragic play of the same name. Soothing rest is not all that shut-eye provides, however. As sleep and cognition researchers Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen explain in their feature article in this issue, the brain is very busy during a night’s slumber. It is processing and sorting all the things we learned during the day, making valuable memories more resilient and tossing away irrelevant details. It finds hidden relations among our recollections and works to solve problems that arose during our waking hours. Turn to page 22 for our cover story, “Quiet! Sleeping Brain at Work.”

There is nothing like a good yarn to pluck our emotional strings, as Jeremy Hsu writes in “The Secrets of Storytelling,” beginning on page 46. Stories are one of humanity’s universals—they appear in all cultures—and certain themes arise repeatedly in tales around the world. Why do these narratives have such power over our feelings? The study of stories reveals clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy. Indeed, as you will learn from Hsu’s article, the stories we tell explain much about ourselves.

Для тех, кому понравились предыдущие книги этой серии: Very Easy True Stories и True Stories in the News и Even More News!Would you believe -- ?
- A woman invests in stocks and makes $22 million -- and then donates almost all of it to a university
- A Japanese guard helps a prisoner of war survive World War II because of the shared love of an opera aria

Beyond True Stories continues and expands the True Stories tradition with eight thematic units, each bases on a real-life, human-interest story. Each unit opens with A True Story in the News, followed by readings and activities that explore the theme. Beyond True Stories is a book students won't want to put down
- Reading strategies and vocabulary building activities help to prepare students for academic work.
- A variety of texts -- including first-person accounts, expository pieces, and graphs -- provide practice with different kinds of reading.
- Thought-provoking discussion and writing prompts encourage personal expression and complete the reading process.