If anyone could give me a clue about why half of the reviews for this are in Persian, that'd be great.
A functional introduction to the topic, assuming next to no knowledge from the reader. That necessarily means there's a great deal of "no duh" material, but it is nice to read academic writing that isn't slathered in dubiously necessary jargon and 10 layers of "theory". Clearly intended to be excerpted for undergrad courses, and parts of it could even be used in high school classes.
On nearly every page are subtitled paragraphs with a dark background that present other perspectives, points of ambiguity, controversy, or complete disagreement with the main text, functioning as large-scale parentheticals. Each chapter ends with two sections, one on more advanced and specific academic books, and one on primary sources, works of fiction/autobiography/history/etc. especially relevant to the chapter. These are not merely lists but compact summaries and recommendations. There is a detailed glossary which also functions as a topical index, along with a regular index and bibliography.
A wide array of topics are covered, necessarily briefly, including the definitions of narrative, the difference between story and plot/narrative discourse (aka histore and récit or fabula and sjuzet depending on which foreign language you want to unnecessarily loanword in concepts that already exist in English), the outer limits of narrative, rhetoric, conflict and closure, characters, narration, narrative gaps, themes and motifs, the relation between truth and fiction, problems of adaptation, and more.
The final few chapters are closer to straight essays, with a chapter on competing narratives structured around the trial of Lizzie Borden, one on interpretation contrasting the views of Aristotle, Freud, Propp and Lévi-Strauss on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, and one on the question of the necessity of narrative closure via an analysis of the early talkie The Jazz Singer, the filmed version of which has a different ending than the script, complicating the amount and kind of closure offered by the ending. While none of these essays are bad, they don't have the machinegun pace of the earlier chapters, which mostly relied on toy examples or short excerpts from the usual suspects like Flaubert/Tolstoy/Beckett, and rarely presented a sustained argument.
Some lip service is paid to non-textual and non-theatrical stories like movies, comics, and paintings, and when discussing plays it usually dwells on plays as performances that are watched rather than plays as texts that are read.
Chapter three, "The Borders of Narrative", was the most interesting to me, covering frame stories, paratexts, hypertexts, role-playing games, MMOs, and games of sport. This chapter caused much musing about what the fuck Homestuck is, which after many years now causes a minimum of psychic damage. Its usage of in-story retconning changing the real-life comic itself probably warranted at least a mention, but I suppose it'll be many years before we have academics both young enough to have read it and old enough to admit to it. The discussion on tabletop RPGs questions to what extent their sessions can be considered stories, and the points raised apply about equally to improv theatre.
A brief discussion of Batman as being a transmedial narrative, having made its point of origin irrelevant, and now spreads itself through a distributed mixture of media (movies, games, tv shows, comics) was intriguing.