Tag: human connection
‘No Longer Human’ Captures the Paradox of the Social Loner
A gloomy young man feels deeply alienated from society. He is preoccupied with his inability to reveal himself to others but has learned to act the clown; he notes that, since childhood, he has “seemed to lack the qualifications of a human being.” He feels distant from his family and freely criticizes his friends. He trains his considerable wit equally on social norms—which he finds almost uniformly silly—and on himself, for his unease in navigating them. He treats his alienation
The Best Books of 2021 Explored Family, Grief, and Desire
Much of 2021 has been filled with a dull sense of déjà vu as the coronavirus pandemic has continued to shrink social worlds and batter morale. Many of the books our writers and editors were drawn to investigated failure, grief, apocalypse—resonant themes at a time of constant rupture and regression. Others helped jolt readers out of routines, and stretched the imagination. The works below span fiction, poetry, memoir, and reportage, but they share a keen sense of the world as