Alone
On different ways of living
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Alone
Narrated by:
Robert Strange
Buy Now for £17.94
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Narrated by:
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Robert Strange
Deborah Levy, author of The Cost of Living
'A beautiful writer and, just as important, a beautiful thinker'
Hanya Yanagihara, author of A Little Life
'Friendship is, in fact, as much the topic of this book as aloneness'
Sarah Bakewell, Guardian
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?
'A heartfelt memoir on being single, living alone and the existential experience of loneliness'
Financial Times
'Romantic love, suggests the author, is the lone "grand narrative" to have survived seismic societal shifts in modern times . . . Hermits and intimacy, the taboo of loneliness and the consolation of friendship - all find their place in a meditation that nods to joy and adversity'
Observer©2021 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, München
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Critic reviews
Beautifully written and elegantly constructed, Alone explores the tension between our desire for the freedom of solitude, and the draw of companionship, and questions how we might disentangle ourselves from inherited ideas about how to live. Romantic love is this relentless grand narrative in our culture but it's only one way of living - what about the grand narrative of friendship? I absolutely loved reading it. (Octavia Bright, author of This Ragged Grace)
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, Daniel 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)
Oh my god, I tore through this breathtaking book! Alone is gorgeously, sensitively written and yet so explicit in its honesty and vulnerability. I connected with it deeply and personally - I truly loved it. (Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours)
Daniel 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 Small Rain)
An intelligent, moving, and heartfelt meditation on the mixed joys and sorrows of solitude. Schreiber's prose is gorgeous, practically silken, and he wears his erudition so lightly that he is the best possible guide on this journey to the elegant lunar landscape of aloneness. (Lauren Groff, author of Matrix)
This is a book to love and to cherish. Daniel 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, author of The Cost of Living)
Schreiber's arguments and personal reflections beautifully capture our emotional lives; they manage to be both honest and inspiring
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