Ways to Tell Stories

Jairo Buitrago

Mariana Ruiz Johnson

From the authors of Ways to Make Friends.

Across different everyday scenes — stories told at night, to solve problems, to spend time together, or half-finished by a great-grandparent who falls asleep — this book maps the many ways storytelling inhabits our lives.

Gradually, it traces the origin of stories back to a primal moment: the creation of fire, when people gathered to listen to one another.

Jairo Buitrago’s playful and irreverent text is accompanied by Mariana Ruiz Johnson’s illustrations, which draw on the language of comics to fragment and reassemble scenes, reinforcing the idea of multiple narratives coexisting at once.