Collections

Catalog

All Narrative Intelligence sources published to the public reading library.

Editor's Picks — Spring 2026

curated by editorial

A hand-curated set of sources. Snapshot is versioned in git for editorial review.

The Erotic Canon

curated by editorial

The literature of desire and the erotic-as-power lineage — from Nin's commissioned collections and Bataille's theory through Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic to contemporary witness. Read for what eros names that nothing else does; held with frame, never as performance. Includes the canon's hardest cases.

Memoir

curated by editorial

First-person testimony — the lived register. Books where someone tells the truth about a life and trusts you to feel it: childhood and its escapes, illness and its clarity, the road and what it teaches. Read for the experiential frame, not the bibliographic one.

The Western Canon

curated by editorial

The canonical works — the long conversation a culture has with itself across centuries. This collection is a growing seed: its spine is wide (see the Western Canon coverage program) and fills as ingestion brings each work online at reading depth.

Mythology & Religion

curated by editorial

How humans have told the story of the sacred — and read sex, sin, and the self through it. Christianity's long argument with the body (MacCulloch, Fredriksen, Pagels, the Pauline scholarship), the comparative reach of myth (Campbell, Apuleius), and first-person testimony from inside religious life. Read for the questions, not the verdicts.

Behavioral Science

curated by editorial

How people form, feel, and decide — the field's foundations and its modern shelf. The theorists who built it (Frankl, Maslow, Rogers, Skinner, James, Freud, Jung; Weber and Durkheim on the social side; Milgram, Zimbardo, and Goffman on what we do around each other) alongside the contemporary writers translating it — Haidt, Dweck, Seligman, Sapolsky, van der Kolk, Taleb.

God & Work

curated by editorial

Two forces that built each other. Religion shaped how cultures valued labor — and the demands of work reshaped belief in turn. From Weber's Protestant ethic to Frankl's meaning-through-task, from Paul's tentmaking to Tolstoy's late turn toward spiritual labor: the long conversation about vocation, calling, and what a life of work is for. Read for the questions it keeps asking, not the answers.

Sex & Religion

curated by editorial

The oldest argument we have with ourselves. Every tradition that organized the sacred also had to rule on the body — what desire means, what it costs, what it might be for. MacCulloch's history of sex and Christianity, Augustine confessing his way out of his own flesh, Bataille making eroticism a theology of its own, and the witnesses — Baldwin, Colette, Tolstoy — who lived the verdict. Read for how the sacred and the erotic keep defining each other.