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Curated playlist

Existentialist books

  • The Ethics of AmbiguitySimone de Beauvoir said in a 1945 lecture that Sartre's ideas could not support ethics. Then she felt obliged to try.
  • Being and NothingnessIn Being and Nothingness, Sartre uses a café waiter to explain bad faith.
  • The Brothers KaramazovDostoevsky died less than four months after The Brothers Karamazov finished publication.
  • Phenomenology of PerceptionPhenomenology of Perception argues that we understand the world through the body before we ever think.
  • Notes from UndergroundNotes from Underground, a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, closes with an accusation aimed straight at the reader. The narrator says, "I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway." A retired…
  • Being and TimeIn 1941, Heidegger agreed to remove Husserl's dedication from Being and Time. Husserl was Jewish.
  • The Myth of SisyphusCamus began writing The Myth of Sisyphus in 1940, as millions of refugees fled German armies in France.
  • The Second SexThe Vatican banned Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex. It sold around 22,000 copies within a week in France.
  • The Rebel (book)The Rebel, published in 1951 under the French title L'Homme révolté, is a book-length essay by Albert Camus. It traces how rebellion and revolution have unfolded in societies, with a particular focus on Western Europe. Camus does not write…
  • I and ThouMartin Luther King Jr. used the book I and Thou to describe segregation.
  • Either/Or (Kierkegaard book)Kierkegaard's book Either/Or appeared in 1843 under a made-up editor's name.
  • Nausea (novel)Sartre's novel Nausea was first titled Melancholia. Publisher Gaston Gallimard pressed for the change in 1937.

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