WSSW Writing Consultant Tom Ribitzky announces the publication of his new book, The Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel: Eros, Failure, and the Quarrel with Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2024).

The Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel: Eros, Failure, and the Quarrel with Philosophy explores the novel as a response to the Platonic myth that narrates the rift at the core of our being. Eros is supposedly the consolation for this rift, but the history of the novel documents its expression as one of frustrated desires, neuroses, anxieties, and cosmic doom. As if repeating the trauma from that original split in Plato—a split that also divides philosophy from literature—the novel treats eros as a site of loss and grief, from the medieval romances to Goethe, Brontë, Proust, Mann, Woolf, Lawrence, and Nabokov.