Cognitive Literary

Following on the heels of Lisa Cron's breakout first book, Wired for Story, this writing guide reveals how to use cognitive storytelling strategies to build a scene-by-scene blueprint for a riveting story. It’s every novelist’s greatest fear: pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into...

Over the past decade, our understanding of the cognition of literature has been transformed by scientific discoveries, such as the mirror neuron system and its role in empathy. Addressing questions such as why we care so deeply about fictional characters, what brain activities are sparked when we read literature, and how literary works and scholarship can inform the cognitive sciences, this book surveys the exciting recent developments in the field of cognitive literary studies.

Blending science fiction, fantasy, and philosophy, MAYA: Seed Takes Root is a new mythology for the 21st century—not of gods and monsters, but of us. For readers of Children of Time, Dune, and An Immense World. The Divya Trials have been announced. Billions will compete. One will ascend to...

Twenty years ago, someone decided that Mara Voss was the most dangerous investigator they had ever encountered. They were right. They just weren't fast enough. The commission document arrives at 2:14 p.m. on a Wednesday in November. It is sixteen pages long. Mara reads it three times before she calls Daniel Farrow, and the third reading is the one that tells her what the first two were protecting her from. She has been inside the case for twenty years without knowing she was inside it. The document describes a program. It describes a mechanism. It describes a validation test, conducted ...

This brilliant novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ST...

This book does not offer answers. It follows Aren, a man who learns early that explanations arrive before questions—and that most of what people call truth is decoration applied after the fact. As inherited beliefs fail under observation, Aren embarks on a systematic examination of what can actually be known. Through science, philosophy, meditation, and lived experience, he discovers not enlightenment, but something more durable: clarity. Surface Conditions is a novel about intellectual honesty. It replaces consolation with precision, meaning-seeking with attention, and transcendence with...

Metaphors We Live By: Book XV Language, Framing, & Thought The word that arrives first owns the conversation. Not because it is accurate. Because it establishes the frame, and the frame determines what questions can be asked, what answers feel satisfying, and what conclusions seem to follow naturally. The argument that follows is already organized before the first sentence is spoken. Language does not describe reality. It participates in constructing the reality people then respond to. Metaphors We Live By: Language, Framing, & Thought is a collection of forty essays examining how language ...