"Stories - whether chronicles of truth or fancies of fiction - pervade our world and shape our understanding of it. They inform our basic impressions of reality and impose structure on our lives. Yet so intrinsic is our grasp of narrative - we all tell stories and like to hear them - that we find it hard to question its purpose or explain its effects.".

"In Making Stories, the psychologist and educator Jerome Bruner inquires into this elusive yet fundamental aspect of human nature and asks how we use it to make sense of our lives. He proposes challenging new ways to think about narrative: to understand how we tell our stories, to see how we use them to create a sense of self and interpret other people's lives, to learn how literature alters the very idea of what a story is and how law teaches us about our expectations of narrative. The result is a masterful, provocative synthesis of anthropology, psychology, literature, law, and philosophy."--BOOK JACKET.