What are stories for? For inspiring and instructing, for explaining and illuminating the world. With stories we argue, entertain, remember, and learn how to live our lives. “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them,” says American writer Barry Lopez. “If stories come to you, care for them.”

Robert Fulford was this year’s Massey lecturer; The Triumph of Narrative collects the five essays he delivered as hour-long CBC radio talks this autumn. The Massey Lectures annually invite a distinguished writer, teacher, or public figure to elaborate on a subject, as Fulford puts it, that springs naturally from his or her work. He didn’t have trouble choosing narrative – or storytelling – as his subject. He’s a writer, reader, editor, and cultural journalist; having stories come to him, and caring for them, has been the business of his life.

Fulford ranges far and freely, and his approaches to his subject are, without exception, fresh. The opening essay – in which he explores that most “unruly and unaccredited” form of narrative, gossip – alights on Saul Bellow’s Herzog, former Toronto Blue Jays manager Tim Johnson’s Vietnam lies, and Grey Owl. Elsewhere he deals with the stubborn currency of urban legends. There’s a fascinating essay on the rise of the unreliable narrator, and one that threads back from Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.

The Triumph of Narrative is full of wit, perception, and a contagious enthusiasm for good books. Essays these may be, but Fulford’s ability to engage us as readers comes down to his own gifts as a storyteller. In the essay on gossip, Fulford credits Mary McCarthy with the suggestion that good novelists are like scandalmongers, tugging us aside to say, “You will hardly believe what happened next. Wait and I’ll tell you.” The same applies here – and if Fulford’s telling, we’ll wait.