Recommendations
Books Like Le Mur by Jean-Paul Sartre
Books for readers who loved the condemned men and Sartre's studies in bad faith
Le Mur (1939) is Sartre's short story collection — five compressed studies in existentialist themes: the confrontation with death, bad faith, the formation of fascist identity. These 8 books share its interest in characters under extreme pressure, its unflinching psychological precision, and its portrait of freedom as something most people spend their lives avoiding.
- 1
Buy on AmazonThe Wall
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Same work as Le Mur.
- 2
Buy on AmazonFicciones
by Jorge Luis Borges
Borges's stories compress entire philosophical universes into a few pages — a different tradition but the same ambition as Sartre's to use the short story as a philosophical form rather than merely a narrative one.
- 3
Buy on AmazonA Good Man Is Hard to Find
by Flannery O'Connor
O'Connor's Southern Gothic stories confront her characters with death and grace with the same relentlessness that Sartre confronts his with freedom and bad faith — both writers use extreme situations to strip away the comfortable fictions people live by.
- 4
Buy on AmazonFor Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
Set in the same Spanish Civil War as 'Le Mur' — Robert Jordan spends three days before a bridge demolition that may or may not succeed, living inside the same compressed awareness of imminent death that Sartre explores in the title story.
- 5
Buy on AmazonDubliners
by James Joyce
Joyce's stories are studies in paralysis — Dubliners who cannot act, cannot escape, cannot choose — which is the shadow form of Sartre's studies in bad faith: both writers are interested in the mechanisms by which people avoid their own freedom.
- 6
Buy on AmazonThe Stranger
by Albert Camus
Meursault awaiting execution in his cell is the single most important companion to Le Mur's title story — both are about what happens to consciousness when death becomes a near-future certainty, and both refuse consolation.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Nine Stories
by J.D. Salinger
Salinger's stories, especially 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' share Le Mur's interest in consciousness at the edge of endurance — characters who exist at a slight angle to ordinary social reality and whose detachment is both a form of perception and a form of damage.
- 8
Buy on AmazonWe Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
Two sisters living in isolation after a family poisoning — a study in the construction of a private world to keep reality at bay, which is the gothic version of the bad-faith mechanism that Sartre analyses from the inside.
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