Since I was young, I’ve suffered from Major Depressive Disorder, coupled with chronic pain that surfaced when I was in middle school. Being in constant pain—mental and physical—obviously drains the spirit. I found no hope whatsoever in phrases such as, “It gets better.” When you have chronic pain, that statement means nothing, because you know it won’t. These books, however, offered me something that I hadn’t encountered before: someone acknowledging that, although it may never get better, there is still something for me here, whatever form it takes. These books do not shame depressives, they console (and even commiserate) with them, and I hope you find them as fulfilling as I have.
The Misophorism Trilogy is a faux-nonfiction book about the cycle of despair, lost history, and forgotten dreams. Through three interrelated stories, despair breaks through the interstices of lost pages, each book addressing a particular strain of the forgotten philosophy misophorism. The Black Plague, the Civil War, and Colonial America harbor histories long unheard, each revealing a pessimistic streak suppressed over the centuries. Dive into the realm of the misophorists, where there can be no life where there is Death.
The Trouble with Being Born is, in my opinion, Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran’s swan song.
Cioran presents a bleak worldview in which history is simply a long string of failures. Paradoxically, however, it’s almost life-affirming. Personally, I can hardly stand the creep of New Age philosophies and attitudes into mental health discussion, part of which inspired my book.
Constant lectures on how I ought to view life, how I ought to cope, and how I ought to “heal,” a word that’s been beaten to death, pretty much had the opposite effect on me. Instead of feeling understood, I felt alone. Contrarily, Cioran offers no such platitudes.
Through his bleak reflections, he offers reassurances that no matter how difficult life can become, we ought to stay our course—or, at least, that it’s too late to do anything about it.
“A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone’s hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.”—The New Yorker
In this volume, which reaffirms the uncompromising brilliance of his mind, Cioran strips the human condition down to its most basic components, birth and death, suggesting that disaster lies not in the prospect of death but in the fact of birth, "that laughable accident." In the lucid, aphoristic style that characterizes his work, Cioran writes of time and death, God and religion, suicide and suffering, and the temptation to silence. Through…
Similar to Cioran, Ligotti has a profoundly dark worldview, but not one that is unearned.
Ligotti’s own experiences with anhedonia and despair seep through his writing. I cannot get enough of it. Through his prose, he creates his own world wherein doom is assured and life seems like a poorly written, performed, and directed play that is in profoundly bad taste.
It may seem like work like this would depress you, but for me, it gives me a sense of understanding. Someone out there, even if it’s just Ligotti’s characters, has felt that gloom.
Thomas Ligotti is often cited as the most curious and remarkable figure in horror literature since H. P. Lovecraft. His work is noted by critics for its display of an exceptionally grotesque imagination and accomplished prose style. In his stories, Ligotti has followed a literary tradition that began with Edgar Allan Poe, portraying characters that are outside of anything that might be called normal life, depicting strange locales far off the beaten track, and rendering a grim vision of human existence as a perpetual nightmare. The horror stories collected in Teatro Grottesco feature tormented individuals who play out their doom…
House of Leaves might need no introduction, but I’ll never shy away from giving it one.
This behemoth is a faux-nonfiction book. Its gloomy undertones and pervasive sense of wrongness are inimitable. When reading House of Leaves, you feel as though something is not quite right—something hideous, inimical, and insidious is lurking, and soon that very thing will come for you.
I still think of those long, dark hallways and endless wandering. A masterclass.
“A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations,…
The Savage God destroyed me upon finishing it for the first time.
Alvarez travels through history in this non-fiction study, tracing the perceptions of suicide from ancient societies to the present day, all with an empathetic eye. Alvarez views suicide both as a societal phenomenon and an intimately personal experience.
His own experience with suicide so closely mirrored my own that I still remember the final pages of the book vividly. To be frank, the book’s a bit dated—it was written in the 70s and some of Alvarez’s comments (as well as his reverence of Freud) haven’t aged well. Nevertheless, the worthwhile sections—of which most of the book is composed—are unforgettable.
"Suicide," writes the notes English poet and critic A. Alvarez, "has permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out." Although the aims of this compelling, compassionate work are broadly cultural and literary, the narrative is rooted in personal experience: it begins with a long memoir of Sylvia Plath, and ends with an account of the author's own suicide attempt. Within this dramatic framework, Alvarez launches his enquiry into the final taboo of human behavior, and traces changing attitudes towards suicide from the perspective of literature. He follows the black thread leading from Dante through Donne and the…
Sure, this novel is a classic. It’s held in that regard for a reason. I’m sure many depressives, myself included, can relate to Meursault’s insouciance about the world.
His utter disregard for all things, how he drifts through life, through the world. Without getting into spoilers, the way in which Camus expounds upon his philosophy through Meursault is perfectly done—and something to give hope to depressives like me, who find little comfort in the empty nothings we hear so often.
With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, The Stranger—Camus's masterpiece—gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. With an Introduction by Peter Dunwoodie; translated by Matthew Ward.
Behind the subterfuge, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.
“The Stranger is a strikingly modern text and Matthew Ward’s translation will enable readers to appreciate why Camus’s stoical anti-hero and devious narrator remains one of the key expressions of…
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Each of the sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also a view of ourselves through the eyes of the bull, illustrating our pre-literate use of myth, how the advent of writing and the urban revolution changed our view of ourselves, and how even bullfighting in Spain is a variation on the ancient sacrifice of the sacred bull.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. In I Am Taurus, author Stephen Palmer traces the story of the bull in the sky, starting from that point 19,000 years ago - a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull. Each of the eleven sections is written from the perspective of the mythical Taurus, from the beginning at Lascaux to Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Spain and elsewhere. This is not just a history of the bull but also an attempt to see ourselves through…
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