Existentialist Essentials

1

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A bitter, isolated civil servant in St. Petersburg delivers a monologue attacking rational egoism and utopian idealism. Considered one of the first existentialist works in world literature.

1864 Russia

2

The Stranger

Albert Camus

Meursault, a French Algerian, kills an Arab on a beach and faces trial — less for the murder than for his failure to weep at his mother's funeral. Camus's most celebrated novel, it introduced absurdism to a wide readership.

1942 France

3

The Plague

Albert Camus

A bubonic plague descends on the Algerian city of Oran, and the townspeople struggle with confinement, fear, and death. Read as an allegory for the Nazi occupation, it is Camus's fullest statement of solidarity in the face of absurdity.

1947 France

4

Nausea

Jean-Paul Sartre

Antoine Roquentin, alone in a French port city, records a growing sense of disgust at the brute existence of things — people, objects, his own hands. Sartre's first novel and his most complete expression of existentialist philosophy in fiction.

1938 France

5

The Trial

Franz Kafka

Josef K. is arrested one morning and subjected to a legal process whose nature and charges he can never determine. Kafka's second novel, published posthumously, is his most sustained exploration of bureaucratic alienation and existential helplessness.

1925 Czech Republic

6

The Castle

Franz Kafka

A surveyor known only as K. arrives in a village to take up a post at the Castle but is never able to gain admittance or clarify the terms of his employment. Kafka's third and unfinished novel, published posthumously.

1926 Czech Republic

7

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka

Travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes one morning transformed into a giant insect. His family's reaction — from shock to resentment to relief at his death — makes the novella a devastating study of alienation within the family unit.

1915 Czech Republic