A visceral account of the Grand Inquisitor Tomas Torquemada, and this method of torture during the murder of thousands of heretics throughout the Spanish Inquisition.

Charles Bowden has been an outspoken advocate for the desert Southwest since the 1970s. Recently his activism helped persuade the U.S. government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument in southern Arizona. But in working for environmental preservation, Bowden refuses to be one who “outline[s] something straightforward, a manifesto with clear rules and a set of plans for others to follow.” In this deeply personal book, he brings the Sonoran Desert alive, not as a place where well-meaning people can go to enjoy “nature,” but as a raw reality that defies bureaucratic and even literary attempts to define it, that can only be experienced through the senses. Inferno burns with Charles Bowden's passion for the desert he calls home. “I want to eat the dirt and lick the rock. Or leave the shade for the sun and feel the burning. I know I don't belong here. But this is the only place I belong,” he says. His vivid descriptions, complemented by Michael Berman's acutely observed photographs of the Sonoran Desert, make readers feel the heat and smell the dryness, see the colors in earth and sky, and hear the singing of dry bones across the parched ground. Written as “an antibiotic” during the time Bowden was lobbying the government to create the Sonoran Desert National Monument, Inferno repudiates both the propaganda and the lyricism of contemporary nature writing. Instead, it persuades us that “we need these places not to remember our better selves or our natural self or our spiritual self. We need these places to taste what we fear and devour what we are. We need these places to be animals because unless we are animals we are nothing at all. That is the price of being a civilized dude.”

Jesus Christ is not a human man, Jesus Christ is a deity. He can transform himself into anything. Jesus Christ and his angels can make human beings experience ectoplasm and can possess you in broad daylight and at night. Any spirit or deity that can shift-shape himself into anything like a fog, smoke, fire, clouds, insects, people or animals is considered not human, suspicious, unknown, scary, sneaky, secretive, and evil.

Hidden behind a cloak of exotic mystery, Cuba is virtually unknown to American citizens. G. Cabrera Infante--in Infante's Inferno and several of his other novels--allows readers to peek behind the curtain surrounding this island and see the vibrant life that existed there before Fidel Castro's regime. Detailing the sexual education and adventures of the author, Infante's Inferno is a lush, erotic, funny book that provides readers with insight into what it was like to grow up in pre-revolutionary Havana. Viewing every girl as a potential lover, and the movies as a place both for entertainment and potential sexual escapades, Cabrera Infante captures the adolescent male mindset with a great deal of fun and self-consciousness. With his hallmark of puns and wordplay--excellently translated by Suzanne Jill Levine--Cabrera Infante has hilariously updated the Don Juan myth in a tropical setting.

In the middle of the journey of our life Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood but then he founds a whole lot of literary movements and arguably modernity itself with his Divine Comedy that, nonetheless, inexplicably, didn't make God laugh. This serious absence caused God's non-divine counterparts, humans, to wonder: "Why are we in hell?" "Why is it so funny?" "And why can't I laugh?"

This new critical edition, including Mark Musa's classic translation, provides students with a clear, readable verse translation accompanied by ten innovative interpretations of Dante's masterpiece.

Arguing that the consecrated body in the Eucharist is one of the central metaphors structuring The Divine Comedy, this book is the first comprehensive exploration of the theme of transubstantiation across Dante's epic poem. Drawing attention first to the historical and theological tensions inherent in ideas of transubstantiation that rippled through Western culture up to the early fourteenth century, Sheila Nayar engages in a Eucharistic reading of both the "flesh" allusions and "metamorphosis" motifs that thread through the entirety of Dante's poem. From the cannibalistic resonances of the Ugolino episode in the Inferno to the Corpus Christi-like procession seminal to Purgatory, Nayar demonstrates how these sacrifice- and Host-related metaphors, allusions, and tropes lead directly and intentionally to the Comedy's final vision, that of the Eucharist itself. Arguing that the final revelation in Paradise is analogically "the Bread of Life," Nayar brings to the fore Christ's centrality (as sacrament) to The Divine Comedy-a reading that is certain to alter current-day thinking about Dante's poem.