Story generation

Upon reading a blog post about a minimalist story-generating python program, I was asking myself - and you - which are the most successful attempts at such programs. I remember seeing something using generating grammars, for instance. And which are the best attempts that, like this one, are extremely compact, either self-contained or able to read, say, the Web or an independent textual corpus (but not simply a file with a large number of story chunks)?

From stackoverflow

• Search for Talespin for some famous ground breaking work. (Example: Micro-Talespin in Common Lisp by Warren Sack.)

  Brenton C : You're much more likely to get upvotes if you give some direct links as opposed to a generic "search for."

  Nixuz : http://norvig.com/ltd/test/micro-tale-spin.lisp