The Marginalian
Storytelling and the Art of Tenderness: Olga Tokarczuk’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate
For Warmth: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Poetic Antidote to Anger
Keith Haring on Creativity, Self-Doubt, and the Love of Life in the Face of Death
Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower: Rilke’s Timeless Spell for Living Through Difficult Times
How to Live and How to Die
Kafka’s Approach to Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gifts
How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love
Be Like Water: The Philosophy and Origin of Bruce Lee’s Famous Metaphor for Resilience
Undoing as Remaking: How Abraham Lincoln Drew Poetry and Power from His Suicidal Depression
Albert Camus on the Will to Live and the Most Important Question of Existence
The Monarchs, Music, and the Meaning of Life: The Most Touching Deathbed Love Letter Ever Written
How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old
The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy
Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness
Why You
Darwin’s Greatest Regret and His Deathbed Reflection on What Makes Life Worth Living
The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity
Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
Blaise Pascal on the Intuitive vs. the Logical Mind and How We Come to Know Truth
Virginia Woolf on Self-Knowledge and the Limits of Empathy
The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning
How We Grieve: Meghan O’Rourke on the Messiness of Mourning and Learning to Live with Loss
Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life
The Blessing of Burnout: Samin Nosrat on the Faustian Bargain of Achievement and the Simple Substance of the Good Life
Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
Relationship Rupture and the Limbic System: The Physiology of Abandonment and Separation
A Life of One’s Own: A Penetrating Century-Old Field Guide to Self-Possession, Mindful Perception, and the Art of Knowing What You Really Want
Oliver Sacks on Despair and the Meaning of Life
The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
Dying Mothers, the Birth of Handwashing, and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind ‘Frankenstein’
Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning
The Reason of Emotion: Bruce Lee’s Unpublished Writings on Willpower, Imagination, and Confidence
Kandinsky on the Spiritual Element in Art and the Three Responsibilities of Artists
How Pioneering Physicist Lise Meitner Discovered Nuclear Fission, Paved the Way for Women in Science, and Was Denied the Nobel Prize
Sleep and the Meaning of Life: Fernando Pessoa on the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours
Carl Jung on Creativity
What Birds Dream About: The Evolution of REM and How We Practice the Possible in Our Sleep
Forgiveness
On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran
Rilke on the Relationship Between Solitude, Love, Sex, and Creativity
When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive
Thich Nhat Hanh on True Love and the Five Rivers of Self-Knowledge
The Middle Passage: A Jungian Field Guide to Finding Meaning and Transformation in Midlife
Blue Is the Color of Desire: The Science, Poetry, and Wonder of the Bowerbird
Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being
How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life
Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living
Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing
How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives: Annie Dillard on Choosing Presence Over Productivity
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation
Kurt Vonnegut on the Simplest, Hardest Secret of Happiness
Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go
The Neurophysiology of Enchantment: How Music Casts Its Spell on Us
The Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love
Don’t Waste Your Wildness
Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself
What Happens When We Die
The Majesty and Mystery of Ice: 200 Years of Artists Reverencing the Wonder of Water’s Wintry Face
The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
How Emotions Are Made
The Single Best Piece of Advice on the Creative Life
But We Had Music
The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life
The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking
A Winter Walk with Thoreau: The Transcendentalist Way of Finding Inner Warmth in the Cold Season
How to Be More Alive: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent on Breaking the Trance of Near-living
Michael Faraday on Mental Discipline and How to Cure Our Propensity for Self-Deception
Love Anyway
The Mystery of Personal Identity: What Makes You and Your Childhood Self the Same Person Despite a Lifetime of Change
A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety
How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe
The Most Valiant Way to Complain Is to Create: William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled
James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe
The Light Between Us
Love After Love: Derek Walcott’s Poetic Ode to Relearning to Be at Home in Ourselves After Heartbreak
The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear
Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death
When Einstein Met Tagore: A Remarkable Meeting of Minds on the Edge of Science and Spirituality
Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96, on What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives
What It’s Like to Touch the Bottom of the World
Do Not Spare Yourself
Albert Camus on How to Live Whole in a Broken World
Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question
Cephalopod Atlas: Stunning, Sensual Illustrations from the World’s First Encyclopedia of Octopus and Squid Wonders from the Ocean Depths
The Pleasure of Being Left Alone
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
How to Bear Your Fear and What It Means to Love: A Tender Meditation in Ink, Watercolor, and Wonder
How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty
Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss
The Purest Definition of Love, the Qualities of a Lasting Relationship, and the Salve for the Betrayals of Time
Diseases of the Will: Neuroscience Founding Father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the Six Psychological Flaws That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gift
The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel
Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss
Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity
Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to His Abusive and Narcissistic Father
Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert
A Spell Against Fear: Tracy K. Smith on Poetry and The Art of Productive Impatience
The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James
Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace
Let the Last Thing Be Song
How to Be an Instrument of Kindness in a Harsh World: George Saunders on Unthinking the Mind, Unstorying the Self, and the 3 Antidotes to Your Suffering
Elif Shafak on the Three Roots of Hate and How to Be a Star Student of Life
Emerson on How to Touch the Universe
How Not to Be a Victim of Time: Rebecca West on Music and Life
How to Be Immense: Trauma Therapist Frances Weller on the Relationship Between Uncertainty and Renewal
Strata: The Consolations and Invitations of Deep Time
How to Hold on to the Light of the World
The Trouble with Romantic Love
Saved by Wonder: The Ziegler Polar Expedition and the Aurora Borealis
Traversal: New Year, New Book (Seven Years in the Making)
Cover Song for the Second Law: A Poem for Beginnings
The Body as Revolution: Che Guevara on Social Medicine and Personal Health as a Political Act
Love, Lichen, and the Art of Trusting Time: The Best of The Marginalian 2025
The Continuous Creative Act of Holding on While Letting Go: 10 Cultural Icons on the Art of Growing Older
How to Bioluminesce: Artist Ash Eliza Williams’s Reveries of Wonder
When Friends Become Lovers: H.G. Wells on Navigating Blurring Boundaries
How to Live Fully: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Remedy for Our Resistance to Change
If Birds Ran the World
The Leaf that Wouldn’t Fall: A Tender Illustrated Parable about the Measure and Meaning of Love
The Woman Who Mapped Labrador and Revolutionized the Literature of Exploration
A Decalogue for the Dignity of Growing Old: Eva Perón’s Revolutionary Rights of the Elderly
Favorite Books of 2025
Beatitude: Poet John Keene’s Spell Against Despair
The Lighthouse Keeper: A Tender Illustrated Meditation on What Saves Us
Little Free Library Divinations: Searching for the Meaning of Life in Discarded Books and Found Objects
The Indissoluble Filament Connecting Us All: Patti Smith on What It Means to Be an Artist
Aldo Leopold on How to Hear the Song of Life
Alphabet in Motion: Artist Kelli Anderson’s Wondrous Pop-up Biography of the Letters
How to Be Human: Kahlil Gibran’s Recipe for Our Spiritual Perfection as a Species
Thanks: W.S. Merwin’s Ode to the Defiant Courage of Gratitude in a Broken World
Love Against Probability
A Lamentation for Linnaeus: In Praise of Confusion and Rewilding Wonder
If You Forget Me: Pablo Neruda’s Staggering (Un)breakup Poem
Chasing Fog: The Science and Spirituality of Nature’s Grounded Cloud
How to Love the World More: Artist and Poet Rachel Hébert’s Breathtaking Catalogue of Gratitudes
Midnight Motorbike: A Lullaby of Wonder for the Sleepless, Inspired by the Whimsy of South India
How to Fix Breakdowns in Communication
Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity
Words: Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Language
How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity
How Not to Waste Your Life
The Beginning and the End of War, in a Stunning Watercolor Reckoning with Humanity
What It’s Like to Meet an Orca
Endless forms of Wonder: The Nautilus, the Leopard, and the Spirituality of Wildness
The Search for Meaning Cast in Clay: 19 Years of The Marginalian in 19 Ceramic Sentences
A Chosen Path of Light: Alain de Botton on Successful Friendships
Perfect Mind: The Gnostic Field Guide to Wholeness and Hearing the Voice of Truth
The Engine of Our Redemption: Nick Cave on How to Use Your Suffering
I Feel, Therefore I Understand: Humboldt on the Essence of Science and How to Read the Poetry of Nature
Annie Dillard on How to Live
How to Be a Good Explorer in the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself
How to See the Milky Way: Instructions for Being More Alive
How Not to Be a Victim of Success
The Three Elements of the Good Life
Heed Your Daemon: Rudyard Kipling on Writing
Eight Takes: How to Tell a Truer Love Story
The Measure of a True Visionary: Jane Goodall on the Indivisibility of Art and Science
The Feather Detective: How Roxie Laybourne Pioneered Forensic Ornithology
The Cell vs. the Crystal: The Philosopher-Naturalist John Burroughs on What Makes a Great Poem and a Great Person
Fernando Pessoa on Unselfing into Who You Really Are
How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo
Ode to a Good Pen: Or, How to Write the Book of Love
The Heart of the Andes and the Invention of Virtual Reality: Frederic Edwin Church’s Immersive 19th-century Paintings of Natural Wonders
The Coziest Place on the Moon: An Illustrated Fable about How to Live with Loneliness and What It Means to Love, Inspired by a Real NASA Discovery
Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success
Virginia Woolf on Love
By Contacts We Are Saved: The Forgotten Visionary Jane Ellen Harrison on Change, the Meaning of Faith, and the Courage of Heresy
On Looking: Poet Lia Purpura on the Art of Noticing
Embodiment and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI
A Heron, a Red Leaf, and a Hole in a Blue Star: Poet Jane Kenyon on the Art of Letting Go
Undersound: The Secret Lives of Ponds and the Mysterious Musicality of the World
Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: Pioneering Philosopher of AI Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity
Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s Most Successful and Creative Predator
Rewilding the Human Spirit in the Age of Moral Colonialism: Brian Eno on Carnival as a Model for Saving Culture
Dawn: A Watercolor Ode to the Primeval Conversation Between Our Living Planet and Its Dying Star