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Existential Despair

A Guide to Sad Books

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Existential Despair

By: Justin McDaniel
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Summary

‘It is never too late to lean into sadness and realize that you can sit with it and others and survive’

Literature is the way we wrestle with grief, meaning and survival. In this book, Justin McDaniel, Professor and former Buddhist monk, invites us on a sixteen-week course of radical reading designed to unsettle, transform and restore. Each chapter is modelled on his popular university course, which requires the class to read a novel in a single sitting, grappling with complex feelings that arise and then articulating them before they evaporate in the busyness and distraction of the outside world.

Through a captivating range of modern classics from around the globe – by James Baldwin, Carmen Maria Machado, Yukio Mishima, Ottessa Moshfegh, Paul Bowles and more – Existential Despair explores the experiences that shape us and test us to our limits, from childhood to longing, sex, loneliness and death.

Existential Despair is a rare opportunity to pursue an immersive reading experience that is so much more than entertainment; one that could save your life.

© Justin McDaniel 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027

 Literary History & Criticism Logic & Language Movements Philosophy

Critic Reviews

'Existential Despair: A Guide to Sad Books is a manual for how to survive a culture that has replaced quality with quantity, relation with isolation, wisdom with platitudes, and the pleasure of learning with dull work. Justin McDaniel’s answer is a lively tour of sixteen books as urgent reading for the art of living' (Siri Hustvedt)
'Brimming with moving reflections on some of the greatest literature you’ve never read. In an era when we’re starving for humanity, it’s the dose of the humanities that we desperately need' (Adam Grant)
Impassioned and timely, Justin McDaniel’s rousing and moving book stems from a simple but increasingly radical idea: that making time to read, to think, to be uncertain, to witness beauty, is something all of us need and deserve more than ever. In an era stuck with dull mantras of productivity and outputs, Existential Despair is a manifesto for being more present, more human. (Seán Hewitt)
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