"A good cry". I libri che fanno piangere

Abstract

The essay explores a literary phenomenon born on the digital platform TikTok: books that make you cry. It is a large constellation of texts characterized by the narration of traumatic situations. The books that make us cry have achieved a certain gender stability, present characterizing indicators and now have a defined canon and their own classics, starting from A Little Life by H. Yanagihara. These texts adapt the sensation novel and at the same time incorporate the narrative logic of some segments of fanfiction. Ultimately, books that make us cry are not only a digital success but also one of the literary phenomena with which the Internet is building its literature and therefore the literature of the future.