Monday Must Read: Rereading a Needed Classic
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning“)—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
At the time of Frankl’s death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a “book that made a difference in your life” found Man’s Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America.
Beacon Press, the original English-language publisher of Man’s Search for Meaning, is issuing this new paperback edition with a new Foreword, biographical Afterword, jacket, price, and classroom materials to reach new generations of readers.
Buy Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (and support an indie press) here:
http://www.beacon.org/Mans-Search-for-Meaning-P607.aspx
Clare L. Martin
This week’s recommendation is a collection, a vital gathering of voices that should be in every poet’s library, in every classroom where we talk poetry: 
Nate Pritts
The beautiful 
Something a little different this week: recommending a documentary, 
This week meet one of my most beloved brother mans 🙂 Peter Grandbois, author of seven books, including: The Gravedigger, selected by Barnes and Noble for its “Discover Great New Writers” program, The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, chosen as one of the top five memoirs of 2009 by the Sacramento News and Review, Nahoonkara, winner of the gold medal in literary fiction in Foreword magazine’s Book of the Year Awards for 2011, a collection of surreal flash fictions, Domestic Disturbances, a finalist for Book of the Year in Foreword magazine’s 2013 awards, and the novella collections or “monster double features,” Wait Your Turn, The Glob Who Girdled Granville (Honorable Mention, IndieFab award in the category of best fantasy of 2014), and The Girl on the Swing. His essays and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and been shortlisted for both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays. His plays have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is senior editor at Boulevard magazine and fiction co-editor at Phantom Drift.
And we’re back—with the amazing Gabrielle Brant Freeman, author of the stunning debut collection When She Was Bad. Gabrielle’s poetry has been published in many journals, most recently in Barrelhouse, Hobart, Melancholy Hyperbole, Rappahannock Review, storySouth, and Waxwing. She was nominated twice for the Best of the Net, and she was a 2014 finalist. Gabrielle won the 2015 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition. Press 53 published her first book, When She Was Bad, in 2016. Gabrielle earned her MFA through Converse College. 
This week’s Must Read is 
This week, meet Karenne Wood, a poet and linguistic anthropologist who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. She earned an MFA at George Mason University and a PhD in anthropology at the University of Virginia, where she was a Ford Fellow. Wood is the author of the poetry collection 
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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