Classics

Being and Nothingness Explained: Sartre’s Philosophy of Freedom

It is one of the most forbidding books of the twentieth century, a thousand pages on consciousness and freedom that almost no one finishes. Yet its core is startlingly simple and startlingly hard to live with: you are free, entirely and inescapably, and everything you do to deny it is a lie. Here is what Sartre's masterpiece actually says.

What Does Kafkaesque Mean? The Word, Its Origin, and How to Use It

Some experiences are so absurd, so airless, so exactly like a nightmare run by clerks, that only one word will do. We call them kafkaesque, and in reaching for a dead novelist's name we admit that he saw our world coming. This is what the word truly means, and why nothing else quite replaces it.