Drawing on the work of James Joyce, the story of Sigmund Freud's patient Dora and the case of Oscar Schindler, Richard Kearney skillfully illuminates how stories are deep at work in fictional writing, autobiography and psychoanalysis and above all, in attempts to talk of the "self." He also considers the stories of nations and how these affect the way a national identity can emerge from stories. He looks at the stories of Romulus and Remus in the founding of Rome, the hidden agenda of stories in the antagonism between Britain and Ireland, and how stories of alienation in film such as Aliens and Men in Black reveal often disturbing narratives at work in projections of North American national identity.