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Books

The Existentialist’s Survival Guide by Gordon Marino

We get existential as Doug Phillips says you have to keep punching until the final bell.

In one of his more forgettable films (I forget which), Woody Allen relays a joke I’ve never quite forgotten, though it’s hardly a tickler. A prizefighter is taking a royal beating, his nose bloodied, his block about to be knocked off. At the ringside sits his mother, next to a priest. “Pray for him, Father! Pray for him!” she pleads. “I’ll pray for him,” replies the priest, “but if he can punch it’ll help!”

Less a joke perhaps than an existential parable, this pugilistic vignette encapsulates the bob and weave between faith and self-overcoming in The Existentialist’s Survival Guide, Gordon Marino’s seven-round rumination on how best to endure life’s hard right hooks.

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