On the Contrary: Oscar Wilde & Friedrich Nietzsche

by Yahia Lababidi

a short read about the wit and wisdom / life and literature of two great rebels and what they have to say to us, today, by one of the world's great living aphorists.

80 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2025

About the author

Yahia Lababidi is an Arab-American writer of Palestinian heritage and the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, aphorisms, essays, and conversations. His work places Islamic mysticism in conversation with Western philosophy, exploring enduring questions of love, conscience, suffering, and spiritual awakening.

His forthcoming book Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West (Ayin Press, 2026) is now available for pre-order. A cross-cultural meditation on art, faith, and moral imagination, it moves between figures such as Nietzsche, Kafka, Rumi, Ghazali, and the poets of Palestine.

Recent books include On the Contrary: Wilde and Nietzsche (Fomite Press, 2025), a playful meditation on two kindred contrarians, and What Remains to Be Said (Wild Goose Publications, 2025), a gathering of aphorisms written across three decades. Poetry from his collection Palestine Wail (Daraja Press, 2024) was twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and translated into multiple languages.

Lababidi’s writing has appeared in Liberties, Salmagundi, The Threepenny Review, Sojourners, World Literature Today, The New Arab, and DAWN, and has been featured on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and On Being. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he has spoken at Oxford University and served as a juror for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund.

His work has been translated into numerous languages and read at literary festivals across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and India.

Reviews

[Tim Pieraccini · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short book, but packed full of riches, and it will send you in search of more Wilde and Nietzsche.
A lot of reading clearly went into this text; at first glance the two subjects appear worlds apart, which they certainly were in the conduct of their lives, but through artful quotation Lababidi draws out the similarities in outlook. After reading this, it may be impossible ever again to think of the two men separately.
I'm not any kind of expert on Wilde or Nietzsche, but On The Contrary has given me a good grounding in the thought and worldviews of both men.

[Samuel Baca-Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

In On the Contrary, Lababidi guides himself and the reader in a meditation on the roles of dichotomy, aphorism, absurdism, suffering, and survival. His wellsprings are the lives and works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde. Both men, like all of us, grappled with horror and wonder. Both deployed wit, art, self-definition, and contrarianism to highlight society’s incongruities and keep themselves temporarily afloat amidst despair. As we scream and stare into the voids of contemporary atrocities and complicities, we can reflect upon these authors’ examples and consider how we help ourselves and others bear both witness and pain. This book will make you want to read more Nietzsche, Wilde, and Lababidi.

[Adriano De Matteis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book felt like sitting between two of my oldest companions — Wilde and Nietzsche — and hearing them finally speak to each other.

Lababidi doesn’t analyze them from afar; he listens to their music, their laughter, their wounds. He reminds me why I fell in love with both: Wilde’s elegance as a form of rebellion, Nietzsche’s courage to turn pain into style.

For me, On the Contrary isn’t criticism — it’s a mirror. It shows how beauty and truth can wrestle inside one soul, how contradiction itself can be a path toward freedom.

A small, brilliant book that feels written not just about Wilde and Nietzsche, but for those of us who still live, think, and ache in their light.