Alone : Reflections on Solitary Living - Daniel Schreiber

Alone

Reflections on Solitary Living

By: Daniel Schreiber, Ben Fergusson (Translator)

Hardcover | 1 November 2023

At a Glance

Hardcover


RRP $34.99

$33.25

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.31 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 5 to 10 business days

A book for our times: a moving meditation on the tension between loneliness and freedom, individualism and love.

At no time before have so many people lived alone, and never has loneliness been so widely or keenly felt. Why, in a society of individualists, is living alone perceived as a shameful failure? And can we ever be happy on our own? Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for solitude and freedom, and for companionship, intimacy and love. Along the way he illuminates the role that friendships play in our lives can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book on how we want to live, Alone spent almost a year on Germany's bestseller list.

About the Author

Daniel Schreiber is the author of the Susan Sontag biography Geist und Glamour (2007) as well as the highly praised and widely read essays Nu chtern (2014) and Zuhause (2017). He lives in Berlin, Germany.
Industry Reviews
'The most moving, memorable books are the ones that attempt to answer questions that the author has been struggling with for his entire life. In Alone, Schreiber a beautiful writer and, just as important, a beautiful thinker explores the questions of not just his life, but our age: Who am I if no one loves me? What are the limits of friendship? How does one live with deep and profound loneliness? This is a book for not just this year, but this era.' - Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life

'Schreiber has written a brave and searching vindication of single life, a book about the cultivation and tending of solitude, about solitude as an art. Amid the bewildering loss of everydayness imposed by the pandemic, when solitude was not chosen but enforced, Schreiber creates in these pages a moving conversation with philosophers and poets, theorists and novelists about the sources of value in our lives. By multiplying our sense of those sources, by insisting on the dignity of models of life that have sometimes been disparaged, this book finally becomes a document of liberation.' - Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness

'This is a book to love and to cherish. Schreiber is such a skilled and engaging writer. Without sentimentality, he digs into the taboo subject of loneliness societal, personal, existential; the salvation of hiking, the many dimensions of friendship, the solace of literature, the value of kindness, the pleasures of solitude. You will meet Nietzsche, Sappho, Arendt and perhaps you will meet yourself, walking in the hills, thinking about new ways to live.' - Deborah Levy

More in Philosophy of The Mind

The Journey : Big Panda and Tiny Dragon - James Norbury

RRP $35.00

$31.75

Meditations : The Annotated Edition - Marcus Aurelius

RRP $49.99

$38.75

22%
OFF
Bright Shining : how grace changes everything - Julia Baird
Beyond Good and Evil : Penguin Classics - Friedrich Nietzsche
Against Interpretation and Other Essays : Penguin Modern Classics - Susan Sontag
Letters From A Stoic : Collins Classics - Lucius Seneca
The Formula of Life : Go Deeper, Rise Higher - Rena Harvey

RRP $34.99

$31.50

10%
OFF
Inner Engineering : A Yogi's Guide to Joy - Sadhguru

RRP $44.99

$37.25

17%
OFF
Beyond Good and Evil : Design by Coralie Bickford-Smith - Friedrich Nietzsche
Collins Classics - Meditations : Collins Classics - Marcus Aurelius
Against Empathy : The Case for Rational Compassion - Paul Bloom
The Lucifer Effect : How Good People Turn Evil - Philip Zimbardo
Ikigai : Giving Every Day Meaning and Joy - Yukari Mitsuhashi
Consciousness : 4th Edition - An Introduction - Susan Blackmore

RRP $96.99

$84.25

13%
OFF