One of the most puzzling aspects of narrative research is the almost irreconcilable breadth of definitions and approaches on the one hand (how many times has the conversation ended with ‘how do you study narrative, then?’) and on the other hand the striking consensus on what constitutes a story but also and importantly what constitutes a story worthy of analysis for the aim of tapping into human experience.

My autobiographical journey to the stumbling blocks of this orthodoxy within narrative approaches involved the transition I made from exploring questions of culture-specificity in prototypical narrative data in Greek (in the early’90s) to having to claim a place in narrative research for snippets of talk that flouted expectations of the canon. The latter I have come to call small stories, following Michael Bamberg (2004a, b) who has worked with comparable data. By prototypical narrative, I mean personal, past experience stories of non-shared events. As I will show in this book, small stories on the other hand are employed as an umbrella-term that covers a gamut of under-represented narrative activities, such as tellings of ongoing events, future or hypothetical events, shared (known) events, but also allusions to tellings, deferrals of tellings, and refusals to tell. These tellings are typically small when compared to the pages and pages of transcript of interview narratives. On a metaphorical level though, the term small stories is selected as an antidote formulation to a longstanding tradition of big stories (cf.“grand narratives”, Lyotard 1984): it locates a level and even an aesthetic for the identification and analysis of narrative; the smallness of talk, where fleeting moments of narrative orientation to the world (Hymes 1996) can be easily missed out on by an analytical lens which only looks out for fully-fledged stories. To return to my story of small stories, the prototypical narrative data that formed the basis of my first book (Georgakopoulou 1997) had actually occurred in ordinary conversational contexts (where I was a participant-observer) and not elicited in research interviews. They still however resonated both with the influential Labovian (1972) paradigm and with the key-events research interview narratives and in that respect they were well connected with the Zeitgeist. They were thus well met even if often seen by colleagues as exotic data: the point was that in many ways, be they in terms of how they were structured or of how they signalled their tellability,–both focal concerns at the time–, they could be viewed