my 15 favorite books
Discover my 15 favorite books, featuring existential classics by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus. From philosophical masterpieces like *Being and Nothingness* to bold fiction and drama, this curated list highlights essential reads for lovers of deep literature.
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Being and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.
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The Fall
by Albert Camus
NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR • One of the most widely read novels of all time—from one of the best-known writers of all time—about a lawyer from Paris who brilliantly illuminates the human condition. Elegantly styled, Camus' profoundly disturbing novel of a Parisian lawyer's confessions is a searing study of modern amorality.
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Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
by Samuel Beckett
The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently escapes to go discover the whereabouts of his mother. In the latter part of this curious masterwork, a certain Jacques Moran is deputized by anonymous authorities to search for the aforementioned Molloy. In the trilogy's second novel, Malone, who might or might not be Molloy himself, addresses us with his ruminations while in the act of dying. The third novel consists of the fragmented monologue–delivered, like the monologues of the previous novels, in a mournful rhetoric that possesses the utmost splendor and beauty–of what might or might not be an armless and legless creature living in an urn outside an eating house. Taken together, these three novels represent the high-water mark of the literary movement we call Modernism. Within their linguistic terrain, where stories are taken up, broken off, and taken up again, where voices rise and crumble and are resurrected, we can discern the essential lineaments of our modern condition, and encounter an awesome vision, tragic yet always compelling and always mysteriously invigorating, of consciousness trapped and struggling inside the boundaries of nature.
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Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line
A nihilistic petit-bougeois named Bardamu opens his medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris.
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Marat/Sade ; The investigation ; and The shadow of the body of the coachman
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No summary available.
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Rhinoceros, and Other Plays
by Eugène Ionesco
A collection of three modern plays by the master of the absurd and member of the French Academy.
