For thousands of years we’ve had theories and rules about writing based on tradition, philosophy, esthetics, poetics, scholarship, mysticism, and arbitrary dictates. Meanwhile, over only the past few decades, cognitive science has discovered much about how the human mind sees and orders the world and extracts meaning from it. It’s high time we mix some brain science into our thinking about reading and writing.

Peter Gelfan has been a book editor for more than 25 years, editing for writers ranging from best-selling authors to first-timers. His novel Found Objects was published in 2013 and Monkey Temple in 2019. He lives in New York City, where he continues to write, work as a freelance book editor, and tutor writing in a public high school as part of PEN’s Writers in the Schools program.


Title: A Book Doctor’s Dose of Brain Science for Writers
Author: Peter Gelfan
Publisher: Adelaide Books
Publisher Website: https://adelaidebooks.org/
Publisher Email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1955196673
Price: $19.60
Page Count: 88 pages
Formats: Paperback

Description of the company: ADELAIDE BOOKS LLC is a New York based independent company dedicated to publishing literary fiction and creative nonfiction. It was founded in July 2017 as an imprint of the Adelaide Literary Magazine, with the aim to facilitate publishing of novels, memoirs, and collections of short stories, poems, and essays by contributing authors of our magazine and other qualified writers.