This is a tough one. Ottessa Moshfegh is one of my favorite writers; she always finds a way to create an atmosphere of intense dread and transfixing disgust in the worlds she creates.
An over-the-top satire on Wall Street culture, rife with brand name obsessions, spectacular misogyny and, of course, murder.
Ah, existentialism. The word conjures images of French cafes, cigarettes and black and white photos, but what is it really?
Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead is a beautifully-written and philosophically intriguing novel with strong animal rights undertones.
A Scanner Darkly is both a novel about an intriguing sci-fi world and a disturbing exploration of substance abuse.
I long to write essays like Joan Didion
Why do I have such an obsession with weird disturbing books by female authors?
Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides is at once a lyrical portrait of 90s suburbia and a biting critique of how teenage girls are perceived by society.
A deeply unsettling horror film with more layers than meets the eye.
In the TV show True Detective , the character Rust Cohle says, “I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law…We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory, experience, and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.”
I first discovered Albert Camus’s philosophy when I was 17, pretty depressed and desperate for something to replace the “hope” that hitherto had been provided by religious faith.
Over the last few years, I have been reading widely about the topic of animal rights to improve my own activism and argumentation. Having a strong philosophical basis for veganism is essential, and frankly, I believe the arguments laid out in these books are pretty irrefutable by the honest person.
Animal Liberation Now is a powerful update to the 1975 animal rights classic Animal Liberation.
I am a big fan of r/nosleep, a forum for users to post short horror fiction. The gimmick of the subreddit is that the stories are often framed as Redditors’ real personal experiences, to enhance the immersion factor of browsing the stories.
Play It As It Lays is one of those books I’ve always seen on recommendation lists with titles like “POV: you’re hot and sad.” So, of course, I decided to give it a read.
Nowadays, I don’t often read Young Adult fiction, but I was immensely excited to dive into this book for some fun and nostalgia. Five Survive was entertaining and fast-paced, but the plot left much to be desired. Let’s talk about it.
Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” is a surreal and disturbing short story set in an unnamed penal colony. The narrative explores questions of punishment and societal justification, revolving around an elaborate torture/execution device that etches the condemned’s sentence into their skin over twelve hours. The reviewer appreciates Kafka’s ability to create a unique Kafkaesque atmosphere. The book receives 4/5 stars.
C.S. Lewis, in my experience, is the darling of those Christian missionaries who hand out religious books to random people on my college campus, and Mere Christianity is perhaps his most well-known and well-lauded book.
The Brothers Karamazov is many things; a romantic drama, a portrait of an important cultural period, and even a murder mystery. But to me, it is first and foremost an exploration of the problem of evil and the paradox of meaning and hope in a world full of suffering.
Veganism: a classically controversial subject. Even mentioning it elicits a strong opinion in most people. In this video, I explain my journey towards adopting this ethics system (as it is a system of ethics rather than merely a diet) and why animal rights are so important.
Frappes and Fiction 