For When You’re Feeling Existential

1. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl — A Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, argues that humans can find meaning through choice, purpose, and love, even in unimaginable suffering.

2. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger — A dense exploration of what it means to be, challenging how we think about time, death, and human existence.

3. The Stranger by Albert Camus — This slim existentialist novel follows an emotionally detached man who commits a murder and ultimately confronts the absurdity of life and death.

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche — A poetic, provocative narrative exploring eternal recurrence, the death of God, and the concept of the Übermensch.

5. Irrational Man by William Barrett — A guide to existential philosophy, introducing thinkers like Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Nietzsche.

6. The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir — de Beauvoir argues that life has no fixed meaning, so our freedom lies in creating values through action and responsibility.

7. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre — A stream-of-consciousness novel where a man slowly unravels as he becomes overwhelmed by the sheer existence of things.

8. The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker — Becker combines philosophy, anthropology, and psychology to argue that all human behavior is rooted in our fear of death and our attempts to outrun it.

9. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy — A novella that confronts the terror of mortality through the story of a high-ranking judge facing his death. As Ivan Ilyich grapples with physical decline and existential dread, Tolstoy explores the emptiness of a life lived by societal expectations and the possibility of finding meaning in its final moments.