Viktor Frankl in Auschwitz and the psychology he built from it; those with a why can bear any how.
A neurosurgeon diagnosed with lung cancer at 36 writes about it until he cannot.
A 14-year-old receives letters teaching the history of philosophy, then finds out who she is.
A girl against the grey men who steal people's time; Ende's fable about hurry.
The Library of Babel, the Garden of Forking Paths and Pierre Menard; Borges in seventeen stories.
Pessoa's assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares and his fragments; the anti-novel of Lisbon.
A concierge who hides her intelligence and a girl planning suicide in a Paris building.
Tomas, Tereza and Sabina in Prague 1968; Kundera's novel of philosophy and sex.
Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who does not come; the play of the century.
Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.
Oran quarantined, Dr Rieux at work; Camus's novel of the Occupation and every epidemic since.
A Brahmin's son leaves the Buddha to find his own way, and finds it at a river.
A bookish narrator and a Cretan who dances; Kazantzakis on how to live.
Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.
Meursault shoots an Arab on a beach because of the sun; Camus in a hundred pages.
Harry Haller, half man and half wolf, and the Magic Theatre; Hesse's midlife crisis.
Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.
Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, until it is not; cultivate your garden.
A spiteful clerk in a Petersburg basement argues with everyone; the first existentialist novel.
Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.
Read Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, exploring themes of the Ubermensch and eternal recurrence.
Read the Tripitaka (Pali Canon), the foundational scriptures of Theravada Buddhism
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