Short Books Ltd

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The definitive guide to telling an unforgettable story in any setting, drawing on twenty-five years of experience from the storytelling experts at The Moth You are a multitude of stories. Every joy and heartbreak, every disappointment and dizzying high, has the makings of an unforgettable story. Whether your goal is to deliver the perfect wedding toast, give a moving eulogy, ace a job interview or simply connect more deeply to those around you, The Moth is here to help. A leader in the modern storytelling movement, The Moth inspires thousands of people around the globe to share their stories each year. In this book, the Moth team reveal the secrets of their time-honed process and use examples from beloved storytellers like Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Nikesh Shukla, Sarfraz Manzoor and more, to show you how to: * mine your memories for your best stories * explore structures that will boost the impact of your story * deliver your stories with confidence * tailor your stories for any occasion Filled with empowering, easy-to-follow tips, this book will help you to unleash the power of storytelling on your life.

From the very first moment she set foot in South Korea, Barbara Zitwer, literary agent to some of the most celebrated Korean authors, fell head-over-heels in love, rediscovering a vitality for life. In this fascinating book, Zitwer shares all that she has learnt about this vibrant country forged by the philosophies of han, heung and jeong: resilience, joy and the art of giving. She takes us from the buzzing capital of Seoul to Buddhist mountain temples, from the bizarre theme park within the Demilitarised Zone to the island of Jeju to meet haenyeo, a remarkable sisterhood of free-divers. Along the way, Zitwer recounts magical moments of understanding and connection, as well as top travel tips and local recipes. The Korean Book of Happiness invites you to explore a beguiling culture and learn how the Korean way can make your life happier and more fulfilled.

Explore the healing, transformative power of shedding tears in this evocatively illustrated study of crying, one of the most uniquely human things we do. What if crying wasn't just an involuntary reaction to feeling sad, vulnerable, or overwhelmed - but a hidden wellspring of power we could harness to live a fuller life? In The Art of Crying, Pepita Sandwich makes the case that crying is humanity's most misunderstood and magical special effect. We are the only animals who shed tears as a result of the emotions we feel. But crying is not our weakness: it's our superpower. Our tears are a path to growth and healing that leads to deeper and more fulfilling experiences. In this beautifully illustrated book, Sandwich dives deep into an ocean of research into tears to understand the science and history of this uniquely human phenomenon. And she has emerged with a case for "letting it all out" a little more often, because tears have a powerful magic all their own.

Sometimes, the smallest things lead to the biggest changes. When struggling with depression and feeling lost after the birth of her daughter, Florence St. George began experimenting with a lump of clay on her kitchen table. Pot by pot, bowl by bowl, she traded Prozac for pottery, finding solace and strength in the therapeutic touch of clay. Pottery soon became a lifeline; a way to rebuild her life and revive her creativity. In just a few years, Florence went from complete beginner to contestant on The Great Pottery Throw Down. Along the way, she found that clay has the power to restore balance and happiness, and light a path through the darkest of times. The Potter's Way is an uplifting and courageous memoir that invites us all to experience the transformative power of clay and creativity.

Past family trauma can keep us unconsciously connected to the past. It shapes our lives in ways we don't always recognise, and can keep us from living to our full potential. In this transformative book, award-winning psychoanalyst Dr. Galit Atlas draws back the veil on the legacy of intergenerational trauma. Entwining the stories of her patients, her own stories, and decades of research, she shows how the people we love and those who raised us live inside us - how we take on their emotional pain - and she helps us identify the links between our life struggles and the 'emotional inheritance' we all carry. For it is only by following the traces those ghosts leave that we can truly change our futures.

Charlotte Moore, a writer and former English teacher, has loved poetry all her life. Keen to be able to read and talk about poems with others, she set up a weekly poetry club for anyone interested to join her round her fireplace. This book brings together a selection of the Tuesday Afternoon Poetry Club's favourite poems, some well-known, some less so. The poems are grouped into themes - from home and lovers, to war and the planets - each framed with a little context from Charlotte and delightful insights from members of the group. The Magic Hour offers a source of lifelong pleasure and nourishment, with words to delight and console, while reminding us of moments of personal significance. It demonstrates how we can all benefit from a dose of poetry in our daily lives.

THE BESTSELLING BIRDWATCHING CLASSIC - 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Look out the window. See a bird. Enjoy it. CONGRATULATIONS! You are now a bad birdwatcher. Anyone who has ever gazed up at the sky or stared out of the window knows something about birds. In this fun, eye-opening and inspiring book, award-winning nature writer Simon Barnes paints a riveting picture of how birdwatching has framed his life and can help us all to a better understanding of our place on this planet. How to be a Bad Birdwatcher shows why birdwatching is not the preserve of twitchers, but one of the simplest, cheapest and most rewarding pastimes around.

Dietary science is on the move. For decades, people were wrongly focused on reducing fat and calories, whereas we now know that the real trouble-makers are the foods that deregulate our blood sugar levels. In writing both clear and empathetic, biochemist Jessie Inchauspé explains why blood sugar spikes are so bad for us and how to flatten those spikes to transform our health. By analysing decades of research and running thousands of original experiments on herself wearing a continuous glucose monitor, she has distilled 10 simple and surprising hacks that can be easily incorporated into everyday life. By the end of this book, you'll be aware of how food impacts your biology. You'll know which breakfast choices may be causing your cravings, in which order you should eat the food on your plate, what not to do on an empty stomach, which foods lead to mood swings, and how to avoid being sleepy at 3pm. You'll evolve the way you eat, take control of your health, and your life will flourish.

From the bestselling co-author of Soccernomics comes the story of how FC Barcelona became the most successful football club in the world - and how that envied position now hangs in the balance. Barca is not just the world's most popular sports club, it is simply one of the most influential organisations on the planet. With almost 250 million followers on social media and 4 million visitors to its Camp Nou stadium each year, there's little wonder its motto is 'More than a club'. But it was not always so. In the past three decades, Barcelona has transformed from regional team to global powerhouse, becoming a model of sporting excellence and a consistent winner of silverware. Simon Kuper unravels exactly how these transformations took place. He outlines the organisational structure behind the club's business decisions, and details the work of its coaches, medics, data analysts and nutritionists who have revolutionised the sporting world. And, of course, he studies the towering influence of the club's two greatest legends, Johan Cruyff and Lionel Messi. Like many leading global businesses, FC Barcelona closely guards its secrets, granting few outsiders a view behind the scenes. But, after decades of writing about the sport and the club, Kuper was given unprecedented access to the inner sanctum and to the people who strive daily to keep Barcelona at the top. Erudite, personal, and capturing all the latest successes and upheavals, his portrait of this incredible institution goes beyond football to understand Barca as a unique social, cultural, and political phenomenon. "I began my research thinking I was going to be explaining Barca's rise to greatness, and I have, but I've also ended up charting the decline and fall."

Catherine Raven has lived alone since the age of 15. After finishing her PhD in biology, she built herself a tiny cottage on an isolated plot of land in Montana, in a place as far away from other people as possible. She viewed the house as a way station, a temporary rest stop where she could gather her nerves and fill out applications for what she hoped would be a real job that would help her fit into society. Then one day she realises she has company: a mangy-looking fox who starts showing up at her house every afternoon at 4.15pm. She has never had a visitor before. How do you even talk to a fox? She brings out her camping chair, sits as close to him as she dares, and begins reading to him from The Little Prince. Her scientific training has taught her not to anthropomorphise animals, yet as she grows to know him, his personality reveals itself and the two form a powerful bond - shaken only when natural disaster threatens to destroy their woodland refuge. Fox and I is a story of survival and transformation, a captivating tale of a friendship between two species in a shared habitat, battling against the uncontainable forces of nature on one side and humanity on the other - immersive, original and utterly unforgettable.

"Read this book and you will learn how photosynthesis was discovered, how it works, and how we can produce more food to feed the world." - PAUL NURSE, Nobel Prize winner and author of What is Life? In Light to Life, biologist Raffael Jovine takes us on a journey of discovery into the intricate, beautiful and often surprising processes that convert energy from the sun into life and how all-important these are to our survival. Despite the unprecedented challenges the Earth faces from global warming, habitat loss, air pollution and population growth; Jovine shows us that there is hope to be found. Photosynthesis is the very source of life: it has the power not just to produce food, but to reshape continents, drive biogeochemical cycles, stabilise the climate and regulate weather. In this exciting, revelatory book, Jovine unveils a blueprint for the future: greening the desert, bringing the ocean on land, planting mangrove forests and oyster banks, growing algae for animal feed, human food and soil carbon... He demonstrates how by harnessing photosynthesis we can regenerate the planet and revise the way we human beings interact with it. This book will help you to see the world in a different way, in all its wonderful detail - through the photosynthetic pigments in your eyes.

"Inspirational" - The Daily Mail "Sarah Sands has written about stillness with an eloquence that fizzes with vitality and wit. This wonderful book charts a journey to some of the most beautiful and tranquil places on earth, and introduces us to people whose inner peace is a balm for our troubled times. I loved every page of it." - Nicholas Hytner Suffering from information overload, unable to sleep, Sarah Sands, former editor of the BBC's Today programme, has tried many different strategies to de-stress... only to reject them because, as she says, all too often they threaten to become an exercise in self-absorption. Inspired by the ruins of an ancient Cistercian abbey at the bottom of her Norfolk garden, she begins to research the lives of the monks who once resided there, and realises how much we may have to learn from monasticism. Renouncing the world, monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live: they labour, they learn and they acquire 'the interior silence'. This book is a quest for that hidden knowledge - a pilgrimage to ten monasteries round the world. From a Coptic desert community in Egypt to a retreat in the Japanese mountains, we follow Sands as she identifies the common characteristics of monastic life and the wisdoms to be learned from them; and as she discovers, behind the cloistered walls, a clarity of mind and an unexpected capacity for solitude which enable her, after years of insomnia, to experience that elusive, dreamless sleep.

"Inspirational" - The Daily Mail "Sarah Sands has written about stillness with an eloquence that fizzes with vitality and wit. This wonderful book charts a journey to some of the most beautiful and tranquil places on earth, and introduces us to people whose inner peace is a balm for our troubled times. I loved every page of it." - Nicholas Hytner Suffering from information overload, unable to sleep, Sarah Sands, former editor of the BBC's Today programme, has tried many different strategies to de-stress... only to reject them because, as she says, all too often they threaten to become an exercise in self-absorption. Inspired by the ruins of an ancient Cistercian abbey at the bottom of her Norfolk garden, she begins to research the lives of the monks who once resided there, and realises how much we may have to learn from monasticism. Renouncing the world, monks and nuns have acquired a hidden knowledge of how to live: they labour, they learn and they acquire 'the interior silence'. This book is a quest for that hidden knowledge - a pilgrimage to ten monasteries round the world. From a Coptic desert community in Egypt to a retreat in the Japanese mountains, we follow Sands as she identifies the common characteristics of monastic life and the wisdoms to be learned from them; and as she discovers, behind the cloistered walls, a clarity of mind and an unexpected capacity for solitude which enable her, after years of insomnia, to experience that elusive, dreamless sleep.

* What's wrong with gluttony? * Would it be boring to live forever? * Should education prepare us for work or leisure? With a light touch, Matters of Lunch and Death distils complex philosophical thought from the ancient world to the present day into a collection of fascinating arguments on life, death, laughter and laziness. Part of the Mobile Philosopher series, this little book will inspire and provoke you, luring you away from newsfeeds and notifications to enrich your mind with deep thoughts and surprising controversies. This is mezze for the soul.

* Does anything happen for no reason at all? * Can you donate your brain and survive? * How long is the present? With a light touch, Logic and Monsters distils complex philosophical thought from the ancient world to the present day into a collection of fascinating arguments on unicorns, sugar lumps, perforated socks and other puzzling objects. Part of the Mobile Philosopher series, this little book will inspire and provoke you, luring you away from newsfeeds and notifications to enrich your mind with deep thoughts and surprising controversies. This is mezze for the soul.

* Is there no escaping bad luck? * Can God be bothered? * How can we learn from the experts? With a light touch, Pigeons Bearing Bad News distils complex philosophical thought from the ancient world to the present day into a collection of fascinating arguments on dreams, jokes, time-travel and AI. Part of the Mobile Philosopher series, this little book will inspire and provoke you, luring you away from newsfeeds and notifications to enrich your mind with deep thoughts and surprising controversies. This is mezze for the soul.