This edited volume, the fifth in the Studies in Narrative series published by John Benjamins, brings together international studies conducted on spoken narratives in everyday and institutional settings, and in several languages (English, German, Greek, Italian, and Hungarian). The collection is united by a focus on the interactive nature of narrative in context. Following an introduction by the co-editors, there are eleven chapters organized into three parts concentrating on (I) narrative development, (II) the co-construction of narrative, and (III) narrative retellings.

In “Different dimensions in the field of narrative interaction,” Becker & Quasthoff contextualize the book in the literature on narrative and introduce its perspective and goals. The authors describe the current field of narrative research as ranging from micro-structural (“linguistic”) to macro-structural (“cultural-semiotic”) orientations to narrative. A goal of this collection is to illustrate the interrelatedness of these concepts. The authors also distinguish “basic research into narratives” (focusing on narrative features and interactive functions) and “applied research using narrative as a means to an end” (focusing on uses of narratives for pedagogical, therapeutic, or other purposes). This volume brings together studies from both of these approaches, analyzing storytelling from a functional and interactive perspective as “a contextualized and contextualizing activity in conversation” (p. 1).

Part I, “Acquiring the world through narrative interaction,” includes four chapters on narrative interactions involving children and adolescents. Both chap. 2, “Fantasy stories and conversational narratives of personal experience: Genre-specific, interactional and developmental perspectives” by Friederike Kern & Uta Quasthoff, and chap. 4, “The role of narrative interaction in narrative development” by Tabea Becker, explore the role of adult co-construction in children's acquisition of genre-specific narrative competence. In chap. 2, Kern & Quasthoff analyze the interactive patterns that emerge in adult–child interaction when 6-year-old children are asked to construct two narrative genres: fantasy stories and narratives of personal experience. The authors find that through their interactive moves, adults support children's growing competence in determination of narrative reportability, topic development, narrative closure, and transitioning between different storytelling activities. Unfortunately, the authors do not specify whether the adults are research team members or other adults (parents, teachers, etc.). In chap. 4, Becker investigates children's acquisition of four different narrative genres (picture stories, fantasy stories, fairytale retellings, and narratives of personal experience) from a developmental perspective, comparing narratives elicited from five-, seven-, and nine-year-old children during adult–child interaction in German. Becker finds that children demonstrate awareness of distinct patterns for the two genres. In telling fantasy stories, children draw on resources (such as formulaic openings and closings) acquired through experience with other narrative texts. In narrating personal experiences, children draw on interactional resources acquired through conversation.

Chaps. 3 and 5 investigate narrative interaction among older children. Chap. 3, “The ‘two-puppies' story: The role of narrative in teaching and learning science” by Richard Sohmer & Sarah Michaels, examines the applied use of narrative as a didactic tool in science apprenticeship. The authors analyze the effectiveness of the “two puppies” narrative (using puppies as a metaphor for air molecules) for explaining the physics of air pressure in the Investigators' Club, an after-school science program for seventh-graders who struggle academically (Sohmer is the teacher). The authors illustrate how the story helps children begin to understand physics and become local “experts” in this new scientific discourse. They come to see the world in new ways, while also experiencing a shared group identity. In chap. 5, “Humorous disaster and success stories among female adolescents in Germany,” Rebecca Branner uses ethnographic and discourse analytic methods to compare disaster and success stories in naturalistic conversations among a peer group of four teenage girls in Germany over three years. She analyzes sociolinguistic functions (identity construction, group emotion, and body politics) and formal features (participant structures, humorous conversational strategies) of the narratives, and finds that the girls’ humorous stories about personal misfortunes help to maintain an egalitarian peer in-group and shared culture, with stories of success being comparatively rare.

Though narrative co-construction is a theme in all the essays, the three diverse chapters of Part II, “The co-construction of narratives,” directly focus on its implications in different ways. Chap. 6, “Construction of self-narrative in a psychotherapeutic setting: An analysis of the mutual determination of narrative perspective taken by patient and therapist” by Eszter Beran & Zsolt Unoka, analyzes psychoanalytic sessions in Hungarian involving a patient with dissociative identity disorder. The authors find that the therapist shifts the patient's narrative perspective so that she can unite her multiple, isolated self-narratives. Like Sohmer & Michaels in chap. 3, the authors analyze the efficacy of narrative as a tool in reorienting reality for participants. In chap. 7, “The role of metaphor in the narrative co-construction of collaborative experience,” Vera John-Steiner, Christopher Shank, & Teresa Meehan explore how ten long-term collaborating dyads of academics and professionals talk (in English) about their creative collaborations. They find different patterns of narrative co-construction correlated with how dyads view their collaborative roles, with more joint productions and shorter turn length exhibited by “integrative” dyads than by “complementary” dyads with clearly divided roles. Both types of dyads employ kinesthetically oriented metaphors (especially of motion) to refer to the collaborative process. Highlighting their interest in cognitive processes, the authors assert, “The co-construction of narratives provides opportunities to explore the hidden nature of thinking” (192).

Chap. 8, “The use of interjections in Italian conversation: The participation of the audience in narratives” by Chiara Monzoni, fits the description of “basic research into narratives” more than the previous two chapters do. Applying a conversation analytic approach to spontaneous multi-party family conversations in Italy, Monzoni examines audience interjections as mechanisms for getting the floor during a narrative telling, whether to question or elaborate on the teller's narrative, or to initiate a new narrative. Such interjections may result not only in new information being added to the story, but also in a negotiation of narrative roles, and potentially, if interactants demonstrate alignment, a co-telling of the narrative.

Part III, “Retold stories,” includes four chapters on narrative retellability. Chap. 9, “Same old story? On the interactional dynamics of shared narratives” by Alexandra Georgakopoulou, and chap. 11, “Interaction in the telling and retelling of interlaced stories: The co-construction of humorous narratives” by Neal Norrick, examine the interactive dynamics involved in (re)telling shared stories. Georgakopoulou analyzes the sequential properties of shared narratives retold in informal group contexts in Greece (including social gatherings, multi-party family interactions, and an adolescent female peer group). She discerns three ways of initiating shared stories – elicitation, preface, and reference – that relate to particular participation frameworks, and telling types ranging from full retelling to mini-telling to quick allusion to the shared narrative. Norrick analyzes interlaced stories told by two German women about their marriage proposals (received within 24 hours of each other) during naturalistic conversation with British friends. The interactive work between tellers and the structure of a subsequent retelling illustrate how collaborative storytelling can alter people's views of their experiences and reshape the narratives themselves. The chapter also offers insights into storytelling rights (which may become storytelling duties in interlaced stories) and the negotiation of humor in narrative interaction.

Chaps. 10 and 12 explore how narratives are recontextualized and transformed in the course of their retellings to particular audiences. In chap. 10, “Institutional memories: The narrative retelling of a professional life,” Jenny Cook-Gumperz examines an interview-based narrative told in English by a professor to a student about a teaching program that was terminated after he retired. The analysis illustrates how narratives can yield insights into collective institutional memory and individual tellers' stances and positionings toward institutions. It also highlights how the narrative is interactively constructed by both narrator and interviewer. In chap. 12, “Narrative reconstructions of past experiences: Adjustments and modifications in the process of recontextualizing a past experience,” Susanne Günthner examines a woman's two retellings in German of a complaint call she received from her neighbor on her answering machine – first, to her mother immediately following the call, and second, to friends one year later. Günthner shows how the original complaint is modified through decontextualization of the past experience and recontextualization in new communicative contexts, illustrating how retellings are adjusted to the contingencies of the current interactive context, topic, and aims.

The collection represents a range of approaches, from the experimental to the ethnographic and from the theoretical to the applied. Linking these diverse studies is a focus on the interactive work carried out by all participants (teller, co-teller, audience, etc.) in narrative (co-)construction. The diversity of engaging (and often humorous) stories examined lends empirical richness to the volume, and the analyses offer insights into various genres, forms, functions, and applications of narrative. However, considering the co-editors' goal of integrating linguistic and cultural-semiotic concepts of narrative, many of the chapters could have benefited from reference to recent anthropological research on conversational narrative (for example, though Quasthoff & Becker cite Ochs & Capps 2001 in their Introduction, few other chapters reference this or any of Ochs and colleagues' wide-ranging studies). Furthermore, for a collection that aims to examine the context and contextualizing force of narratives, there is very little description of the contexts of these studies. The chapters are inconsistent in how much detail is devoted to contextualizing the data they analyze, with some even neglecting to specify where the study took place (the reader is left to make assumptions based on the language found in the transcript examples). Also, there is no section describing the contributors or their institutional affiliations. These details are necessary in a volume of international scope such as this one. In addition, the reader may be distracted by spelling and grammatical errors and editorial inconsistencies. Despite these limitations, the book is a useful addition to our understanding of the fundamental role narrative plays in human communication, sense-making, and the interactive construction of reality.