PolyArchive

In your autobiography you not only tell an immense amount about yourself – you quote what everybody else said to you. My life, I should say, would have been ruined by what other people have said about what they thought I said or did, on occasions, – if I had let it be. So I […]

Writing is not a sexy business. It’s not a rare butterfly that floats down and gently kisses you on the nose with a brilliant idea that conjures a hurricane of cash. It’s frustrating, and it’s lonely, and for most people, it doesn’t pay. But one genre consistently makes it work. Romance writers who are able […]

Cult Classic A Novel Sloane Crosley 306 pages Farrar, Straus and Giroux (MCD) Publication date: ‎ June 7, 2022 From the publisher: Hilariously insightful and delightfully suspenseful, Cult Classic is an original: a masterfully crafted tale of love, memory, morality, and mind control, as well as a fresh foray into the philosophy of romance. MOST […]

Edna St. Vincent Millay critiques E.E. Cummings Two of our favorite poets around here are Edna St. Vincent Millay and E.E. Cummings, who, despite overlapping in lifespans, hail from two different generations of American poetry. In Savage Beauty, an excellent Millay biography by Nancy Milford, the author reconstructs Millay’s contributions to the 1933 Guggenheim Fellowship […]

A Hundred Suns: A Novel by Karin Tanabe Description Named A Best Book of Spring 2020 by Real Simple · Parade · PopSugar· New York Post · Entertainment Weekly · Betches · CrimeReads · BookBub “A transporting historical novel, and a smart thriller.”— Washington Post “A luscious setting combined with a sinister, sizzling plot.” -EW […]

Your Brain, Explained: What Neuroscience Reveals About Your Brain and its Quirks Marc Dingman ‎Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2019 256 pages From the publisher: Sleep. Memory. Pleasure. Fear. Language. We experience these things every day, but how do our brains create them?   Your Brain, Explained is a personal tour around your gray matter. Neuroscientist Marc Dingman […]

Health is Membership Wendell Berry Wendell Berry delivered a speech at the conference “Spirituality and Healing,” at Louisville, Kentucky, on October 17, 1994. Below is an excerpt: So far, I have been implying my beliefs at every turn. Now I had better state them openly. I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John […]

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times Katherine May Riverhead Books 256 Pages Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from […]

Music A Subversive History by Ted Gioia Perseus Books, Basic Books 528 pages, published 2019. From the publisher: “A dauntingly ambitious, obsessively researched” (Los Angeles Times) global history of music that reveals how songs have shifted societies and sparked revolutions. Histories of music overwhelmingly suppress stories of the outsiders and rebels who created musical revolutions […]

Felicity Carrol and the Murderous Menace is the second book in a cozy mystery series by Patricia Marcantonio. Released 11th Feb 2020 by Crooked Lane Books, it is 324 pages long and available in hardcover and ebook formats. Despite being the second book in the series, it works well as a standalone. This book features […]

Tom Vanderbilt | Slate: The Single Most Important Object in the Global Economy. The pallet. Cindy Lamothe | The Atlantic: When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life. Some people who have to be responsible for their siblings or parents as children grow up to be compulsive caretakers. Christer Petley | […]

Olga Khazan | The Atlantic: We Expect Too Much From Our Romantic Partners. A new book explores how marriage has changed in recent years, and why that’s made staying married harder. Stuart Firestein | Nautilus: How Pseudoscientists Get Away With It. “They imitate the ways in which science works and make claims as if they […]

Catherine Caruso | Scientific American: Don’t Forget: You, Too, Can Acquire a Super Memory. Learning a memorization technique used by elite memory athletes leads to widespread changes in brain wiring. Amber Rae | Fast Company: How To Schedule Your Day For Peak Creative Performance. Elizabeth Winkler | The Atlantic: Was Shakespeare a Woman? The authorship […]

Links of the week… maybe not every week, but this week! Dave Weinstein | Eichler Network: When Joe Eichler Spoke Out About Race. He made good on his threat to resign from the San Francisco NAHB over their resistance to abolish discriminatory policies. Gillian Osborne | Boston Review: Herman Melville the Poet. The author of […]

Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant Ann Gardiner Perkins Sourcebooks, 2019 Writing for an academic audience (such as in a dissertation) is totally different from how stories are told in popular non-fiction, so it is rare when an author can turn academic research into […]