Existential Despair
A Guide to Sad Books
$54.60
- Hardcover
272 pages
- Release Date
20 April 2027
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 …
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780241776674 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0241776678 |
| Author: | Justin McDaniel |
| Publisher: | Penguin Books Ltd |
| Imprint: | Particular Books |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 272 |
| Release Date: | 20 April 2027 |
| Weight: | 397g |
| Dimensions: | 27mm x 156mm x 240mm |
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Critics Review
‘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
Justin McDaniel
Justin McDaniel is the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He has won teaching and advising awards at Harvard University, Ohio University, the University of California, and the Ludwig Prize for Teaching at Penn.
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