‘A delightful book, full of jokes and confessions’ Guardian
A hilarious quest to understand life’s ultimate guilty pleasure
In Schadenfreude, historian of emotions Tiffany Watt Smith offers expert insight and advice. Ranging across thinkers from Nietzsche to Homer Simpson, investigating the latest scientific research, and collecting some outrageous confessions on the way – she reveals how everyone, babies, nuns, your most trusted friends, are enjoying your misfortunes. But rather than an emotional glitch, she argues, Schadenfreude can reveal profound truths about our relationships with others and our sense of who we are.
Frank, warm and laugh-out-loud funny, Schadenfreude makes the case for thinking afresh about this much-maligned emotion – and perhaps, even, embracing it.
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Tiffany Watt Smith is a cultural historian and author of two books about the history of feeling On Flinching and The Book of Human Emotions. In 2014, she was named a BBC New Generation Thinker. She is currently a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and a lecturer in the School of English and Drama. In her previous career, she was a theatre director.