New Book Notification: [apologies for cross posting] I'm delighted to announce the recent publication of 'Stories and Social Media: Identities and Interaction' (Routledge, 2012), http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415889810/. Please see below for a brief description and Table of Contents. Best wishes Ruth Description: This book examines everyday stories of personal experience that are published online in contemporary forms of social media. Taking examples from discussion boards, blogs, social network sites, microblogging sites, wikis, collaborative and participatory storytelling projects, Ruth Page explores how new and existing narrative genres are being (re)shaped in different online contexts. The book shows how the characteristics of social media, which emphasize recency, interpersonal connection and mobile distribution, amplify or reverse different aspects of canonical storytelling. The new storytelling patterns which emerge provide a fresh perspective on some of the key concepts in narrative research: structure, evaluation and the location of speaker and audience in time and space. The online stories are profoundly social in nature, and perform important identity work for their tellers as they interact with their audiences - identities which range from celebrities in Twitter, cancer survivors in the blogosphere to creative writers convening storytelling projects or local histories. Stories and Social Media brings together the stories told in well-known sites like Facebook and lesser-known community archives, providing a landmark survey and critique of personal storytelling as it is being reworked online at the start of the 21st century. Contents: Preface 1: Introduction: Stories and Social Media in Context 2: Second Stories Told in Discussion Forums 3: Narratives of Illness and Personal Blogs 4: Storytelling Styles in Facebook Updates 5: Celebrity Practice: Stories told in Twitter 6: Narrative and Commentary in Collaborative Storytelling 7: Space and Identity in Stories on the Move 8: Fakes, Fictions and Facebook "Rape": Narrative Authenticity 9: Familiar, Reconfigured and Emergent Dimensions of Narrative Dr Ruth Page Room 1509, Attenborough Tower School of English University of Leicester Leicester LE1 7RH UK +44 (0)116 223 1286