Existential Despair
A Guide to Sad Books
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Existential Despair
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Justin McDaniel
Imagine a class that meets for eight hours once a week. There are no devices, just one book to read in silence and discuss with the group at the end. No prep. No papers. No final exams. Just read a book and think about it.
That’s exactly what University of Pennsylvania professor Justin McDaniel—former Buddhist monk and Guggenheim Fellow—asks of his students in Existential Despair, which perhaps ironically became the most popular course on campus. Drawing on this celebrated class, McDaniel now guides readers through sixteen weeks of radical reading designed to unsettle, transform, and restore.
With bracing candor and erudite analysis, Existential Despair introduces readers to modern classics of literature by James Baldwin, Carmen Maria Machado, Yukio Mishima, Ottessa Moshfegh, Paul Bowles, and others, exploring universal themes including childhood, longing, sex, loneliness, and death. Each chapter models McDaniel’s unconventional approach: reading entire novels in one sitting, grappling with discomfort, and practicing deep concentration free of distraction. This book is not a self-help manual, nor a path to quick fixes. Instead, it offers readers an opportunity to experience what hundreds of students already have: literature as a way to wrestle with grief, meaning, and survival.
As McDaniel writes, “This is not about hope or triumph—it’s about learning to live alongside despair.”
Existential Despair is an immersive reading experience that cultivates rigorous intellectual and personal engagement, a crash course in living with focus, intention, and presence of mind.
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Critic reviews
“McDaniel’s book is truly exceptional, like nothing else out there. He teaches you how to love again, to wonder, to embrace uncertainty and sadness, and to be challenged by just breathing. This book is about opening yourself up, feeling deeply, being vulnerable and breathless and awkward, and pushing your own limits. McDaniel guides you by recommending great modern literature, reading them cover to cover with no distractions, no notes, no accomplishing, only to embark on a humanistic voyage that will lead who knows where. But like the great teacher he is, McDaniel is confident it will be enlightening and magical in the way all true self-discovery is.” —Ezekiel J. Emanuel, bioethicist and author of sixteen books including Eat Your Ice Cream
“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, author of the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men
“Many students have told me that Justin McDaniel’s course on existential despair has changed their lives for the better. This book is your chance to audit his class, and it’s brimming with moving reflections on some of the greatest literature you’ve ever read. In an era when we’re starving for humanity, it’s the dose of the humanities that we desperately need.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Vibe and Think Again, and host of the Re:Thinking podcast
“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, author of the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men
“Many students have told me that Justin McDaniel’s course on existential despair has changed their lives for the better. This book is your chance to audit his class, and it’s brimming with moving reflections on some of the greatest literature you’ve ever read. In an era when we’re starving for humanity, it’s the dose of the humanities that we desperately need.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Vibe and Think Again, and host of the Re:Thinking podcast
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