Existentialism

Existentialism: A Reader’s Guide to the Meaning, Key Ideas, and Essential Books

Existentialism is less a doctrine than a set of questions that will not leave a thinking person alone: what it means to be free, how to live without a given purpose, and whether a life can be made rather than merely inherited. This guide maps the whole territory, its ideas, its great writers, and the books through which to enter it.

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.