Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
    The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
    The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
    Audiobook4 hours

    The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

    Written by John Koenig

    Narrated by John Koenig

    5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

    “It’s undeniably thrilling to find words for our strangest feelings…Koenig casts light into lonely corners of human experience…An enchanting book. “ —The Washington Post

    A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express—until now.

    Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a life as vivid and complex as your own? That feeling has a name: “sonder.” Or maybe you’ve watched a thunderstorm roll in and felt a primal hunger for disaster, hoping it would shake up your life. That’s called “lachesism.” Or you were looking through old photos and felt a pang of nostalgia for a time you’ve never actually experienced. That’s “anemoia.”

    If you’ve never heard of these terms before, that’s because they didn’t exist until John Koenig set out to fill the gaps in our language of emotion. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows “creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have,” says John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars. By turns poignant, relatable, and mind-bending, the definitions include whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world, interspersed with otherworldly collages and lyrical essays that explore forgotten corners of the human condition—from “astrophe,” the longing to explore beyond the planet Earth, to “zenosyne,” the sense that time keeps getting faster.

    The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is for anyone who enjoys a shift in perspective, pondering the ineffable feelings that make up our lives. This is the perfect gift for creatives, word nerds, and human beings everywhere.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateNov 16, 2021
    ISBN9781797135823
    Author

    John Koenig

    John Koenig is a video maker, voice actor, graphic designer, and writer. Born in Idaho and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, he created The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows in 2009, first as a blog at DictionaryofObscureSorrows.com before expanding the project to YouTube. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and daughter.

    Related to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

    Related audiobooks

    Reference For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      No, You Can’t Feel Sorry for Everyone: The idea of empathy for all ignores the limits of human psychology.

      Apr 14, 2016

      The world seems to be getting more empathetic. Americans donate to charity at record rates. People feel the pain of suffering in geographically distant countries brought to our attention by advances in communications and transportation. Violence, see

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The 40 Greatest Books To Read Before You Die

      Apr 25, 2021

      Books, books, books. They will increase your lifespan, lower your stress and boost your intelligence. They will give you fuller, thicker hair. Whatever the breathless claims about reading, one thing is certain: losing yourself in a great novel is one

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ask A Literary Consultant

      Sep 3, 2020

      Ask A Literary Consultant
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Where Thoughts Become Paths

      Sep 5, 2022

      Where Thoughts Become Paths
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Dec 7, 2021

      He wouldin case of divorcelay claim to halfof everythinghe said.Half a sofa,half a TV,half a summerhousehalf a pound of butterhalf a child. The apartment was hishe saidbecause it was in his name.The thing washe loved her. She loved anotherwhose wife

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Can Brains Be Trusted?

      Dec 6, 2021

      Can Brains Be Trusted?
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      An Interview With Bianca Stone

      May 1, 2023

      An Interview With Bianca Stone
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      In Search of Lost Memories

      Jun 9, 2024

      Nearly all memoirists encounter challenges with remembering events and emotions from years or even decades ago. Long-term memory is notoriously slippery and fickle, and much of it is stored in our subconscious rather than conscious minds. By spending

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A CLOSER LOOK AT Being a Fox

      Nov 1, 2017

      A CLOSER LOOK AT Being a Fox
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      It’s Not You, It’s Me

      Sep 1, 2021

      Like many of you reading this, I mispronounced words growing up that I first encountered in books. These words gained a life of their own in the quiet hallways of my mind. This internal sense of sound and language had a tendency to trump the world’s,

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Benefits of Emodiversity

      Nov 26, 2021

      The Benefits of Emodiversity
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wistful Thinking

      Jan 2, 2022

      Wistful Thinking
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Blue Minded

      Apr 3, 2019

      Blue Minded
      30 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cave On Cave

      Oct 17, 2019

      Cave On Cave
      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Crowdsourced Expert Interview: Nautilus readers delve further into the idea that metaphors make us human.

      May 30, 2013

      In “Metaphors Are Us,” biologist and neurologist Robert Sapolsky made a good case for why symbolic thinking may be the key feature separating humans from our nearest animal relatives. But that essay didn’t end the discussion, which spilled onto socia

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Kekulé Problem

      Apr 20, 2017

      Cormac McCarthy is best known to the world as a writer of novels. These include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) he is a research colleague and thought of in complementary te

      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Burning World

      Sep 1, 2023

      CHRISTIAN WIMAN teaches at Yale Divinity School. He is the author most recently of Survival Is a Style. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, to be published in December by Farrar, Straus & G

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Bird That Sang I Am

      Sep 1, 2021

      The Bird That Sang I Am
      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Imagination AND YOU

      Oct 5, 2023

      Having built the foundations of our writing approach over the previous several issues, I fully intended this month to begin looking at the nuts and bolts of creative writing – structure, dialogue, description, etc. But as I began to write, something

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Linguist Responds to Cormac McCarthy

      May 25, 2017

      In his recent Nautilus essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” Cormac McCarthy suggests that our unconscious mental processes are a modern echo of the prelinguistic minds of our prehistoric ancestors. He sees a stark contrast between language as a fairly recent

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Metaphors Are Us

      Sep 5, 2019

      The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill completely. I own a hammer and know how to operate it. But I couldn’t f

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Metaphors Are Us: War, murder, music, art. We would have none without metaphor.

      Apr 29, 2013

      The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill completely. I own a hammer and know how to operate it. But I couldn’t f

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

    5/5

    44 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Glad to be the first one to rate this! I’m only a quarter of the way through but The book and audio book together are wonderful! I missed your videos on YouTube. As soon as I saw an update I clicked right away.. I think I might just have to carry the book everywhere I go now so people can understand half the words I say..

      3 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book will make you feel seen, know, and validated :) READ IT! Or listen, his voice is ??
    • 5/5
      I read a paper copy of this book and it quickly became my favorite thing. Each page left me feeling like there couldn’t possibly be even more to follow, that there couldn’t be anymore words that would be so gut wrenching, warming, and contemplative. I listened to a bit of this audio book considering it’s narrated by Koenig himself, amazing voice.

      2 people found this helpful

    pFad - Phonifier reborn

    Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

    Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


    Alternative Proxies:

    Alternative Proxy

    pFad Proxy

    pFad v3 Proxy

    pFad v4 Proxy