The Story of Stories

From the first night fires to the smartphone, Kevin Ashton, an MIT technology pioneer who helped lead the digital revolution that produced the phone, tells the history of storytelling itself. He organizes it around eight great revolutions that share one pattern: each major new storytelling tool widens both the circle of tellers and the size of their audiences. Along the way he argues that stories led to language rather than the reverse, and follows rhyme and song, cave paintings, writing, several independent inventions of printing, and electric, electronic and digital media, to show where the digital era sits in that long arc. Ashton worked on the book for more than twenty-five years.

Adam Grant chose it for The New Books to Refresh Your Thinking in 2026 as a tour of the hidden history of narrative and where it may go next.