Martha,

If your sentence occurred in academic writing or a formal student essay, certainly the conjoined subject complement and the plural “stories” would require a plural verb.  This question has been reported on The Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/).  If you go to that site and use their search function to search on “there’s,” you’ll find a number of pieces discussing the construction.

That said, your question reflects an important pedagogical issue.  How do we distinguish between spoken and written English.  While “there’s” is pretty well established in spoken English, even in more formal registers, it isn’t well established in formal written English.  It is common enough, though, to be one of those informal spoken features that is on the verge of general acceptance.  In my classes I think I’d still ask for “there are” with plurals, but I would also explain and explore how the language is changing.

Herb  

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