Existential Despair: A Guide to Sad Books Book Review and Summary
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Carmen Martinez - 09 Sep, 2026 16:54
Author: Justin McDaniel
Page Count: Unknown
Publication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL
The coffee in this styrofoam cup tastes like battery acid filtered through a dirty gym sock, which feels entirely appropriate for previewing a text about existential dread. Justin McDaniel—an ex-monk with a tenure track at Penn, because of course—has packaged his viral syllabus into Existential Despair. It’s a book promising sixteen weeks of radical reading designed to make elite undergrads sweat through their Patagonia fleeces. No phones, no prep, just raw literary suffering. But let us be entirely serious for a second. The man makes students read whole novels in one sitting while staring blankly into space like lobotomized Victorian orphans. Peak performance academia, folks. No notes.
The Curriculum of Suffering
The premise leans hard on the modern allergy to silence. We are drowning in algorithmic dopamine soup, so tossing James Baldwin, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Yukio Mishima at over-caffeinated kids is frankly a genius psyop. Yet, let us backtrack for a moment—actually, scrap that, McDaniel’s syllabus is totally derivative garbage masquerading as pedagogical bravery. Every depressed sophomore in Brooklyn already reads Moshfegh while chain-smoking American Spirits in their overpriced walk-ups. Do we really need an Ivy League professor to curate our collective panic attacks? Apparently yes, because the culture demands commodified misery packaged with a sleek academic bow.
The Gutter-Level Aesthetic of Gloom
The promotional copy insists this isn’t a self-help manual, which is industry-speak for “buy this so you can look smart reading it on the subway.” We are promised a masterclass in living alongside grief, meaning, and survival without cheap resolutions. No silver linings. No toxic positivity. Just pure, unadulterated literary gut-punches. Baldwin and Mishima do not care about your personal growth; they want to drag your psyche behind a rusty pickup truck. McDaniel apparently wants to recreate that exact vibe for the tuition-paying masses.
The Anticipated Trainwreck
Prediction time. The publishing industrial complex will turn this into the ultimate lifestyle accessory for people who post screenshots of their Kindle progress bars on Instagram. It will sell a metric ton of copies to tech bros pretending they have inner lives. Then again, maybe stripping away the PowerPoint slides and forcing people to sit with actual prose is the exact kind of high-brow asceticism we desperately need right now. Or maybe it is just incredibly pretentious theater for people who peaked in high school AP Lit.
I need to close this laptop before the waitress realizes I have been nursing the same lukewarm tap water for three hours, mostly because I have to go debate the merits of absurdism with a sketchy stranger in a dimly lit dive bar across the street.
#existentialdespair #reading #literaryfiction #academia
