There’s a list of books that I love, but cannot bring myself to spring on random strangers. They’re books I adore deeply, have changed my life and cut to my core, but, so help me, they are bleak. They hurt. The first time I came across Claire Vaye Watkins’s stunning story collection Battleborn, I had to pause every few paragraphs to collect myself. Her stories, most of which are set in the deserts of Nevada, stood out with such sharp, precise clarity that everything else I had read before and after that felt like a fuzzy dream. The short stories of Joy Williams have had a similar effect on me—surgeon’s warning: be prepared for sudden onsets of intense emotional pain. Read her story “Taking Care,” which skulks along snowy New England so beautifully that you hardly notice the despair lurking under the ice, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. After the surgery, I got a call from my mother letting me know everything went well, but my father forgot his overnight bag—would I mind dropping it off? I did, and my heart sunk as I saw my father hooked up to a series of wires, taped up around his arms and stomach. It sank even deeper when he opened his duffle bag and sitting right at the top was The Things They Carried.

The Sadness Book - A Journal To Let Go - Goodreads

There are some books that become renowned largely for their capacity to make people cry— just look at Jodi Picoult’s entire career. People enjoy going into a sad book like it’s some kind of a mountain to be climbed. We crave the emotional labor that comes with reading a book that is particularly difficult or sad. But what I also notice is the sense of camaraderie between readers that comes with a particularly trying text.Only three books have made me full-blown ugly cry: The Selected Stories of Alice Munro (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” if we’re being specific), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and the fifth Harry Potter book. Be warned. Triangle of Sadness rants and smirks at the state of the world over two-and-a-half hours, which is quite some running time for a satirical comedy. But it is never boring. Partly that's because the political commentary is so shrewd, and partly it's because it has a surprising amount of warmth and nuance, too. Östlund ensures that while the situations may be absurd, the people in them are as human as any of us. Despite my spotty history of book recommendations, I work in a bookstore now. The other day a woman walked up to the counter holding a copy of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. “Will this make me cry?” she asked me. I told her: yes, it will. I insisted she buy it anyways. Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

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Actually, that's not entirely fair, because although Östlund makes his points with unapologetic frankness, the Swedish writer-director's first English-language film shows that he is still capable of quietly uncomfortable, penetrating social comedy. This is what we get in the opening scenes, when the film appears to be a straightforward lampoon of the fashion industry. In advertising shoots, notes Östlund, the more expensive the brand, the more grumpy the models have to pretend to be. As for the title, the "triangle of sadness" is the term given to the frown lines between your eyebrows.Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. When looking for your next great read, it's easy to gravitate towards romance novels with happy endings or fantasy books with satisfying conclusions. But just as horror fans love a creepy-crawly feeling and sci-fi readers crave the chaos of a good dystopia, it can feel good to experience the raw emotions of a devastating story that makes you want to cry. Of course, there’s a fine line between a book that will make you cry and a book that will rip your soul to pieces. I recently chatted with a customer purchasing a copy of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. She told me that she and a friend gave each other a copy for Christmas and have been reading it together. She regretted that she was a bit ahead of her friend. She wanted to tell her friend that things get better for the characters, but she simply couldn’t give her that false hope. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Chevron icon It indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options. Of all the titles I gave him—Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, Brenda Wineapple’s Ecstatic Nation—Tim O’Brien had been tossed in as an afterthought. We’d chatted about war literature over lunch the other day and I commented that the book was favorite of mine. He said he would like to read it sometime. Little did I know that he not only wanted to read it, but that he would also bring it with him directly after having had invasive surgery.

Sad Books That Will Emotionally Wreck You | Penguin Random 15 Sad Books That Will Emotionally Wreck You | Penguin Random

When I asked who the third copy was for, she responded: “Oh, another friend—we’re thinking about starting a support group.”