Elisabeth Tonnard's In This Dark Wood is a study of urban alienation in America. In a haunting, modern-gothic style, it pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations, collected by Tonnard, of the famous first lines of Dante's Inferno: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita." ("In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood / for the straight way was lost"). The images were selected from the Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers who worked in San Francisco from the 1940s to the 70s. This edition is a reprint of a work originally self-published in 2008.

Midway Through The Journey Of Our Life is about a pivotal year in the life of a beautiful and successful woman. A 50th birthday party sets the stage for a spiritual upheaval in the world of Karin Sorensen, who jeopardizes everything that has made her life worthwhile, not for a grand passion, but for a whim, an errant desire that takes over the reason and her will. What transpires is a rich and complex story of predators and prey, affluence and squalor, terrorism and addiction. An embittered teacher plots revenge. A ghost from the past reemerges in a new form. A billionaire rethinks his life. An aged patriarch has prophetic insights. An escort turns out to be more than she seems. The black sheep of the family transforms her life. Its a tale full of unexpected twists and turns, set mostly in contemporary Manhattan.

Written between 1954 and 1957 and treating events from the Stalinist era of Czechoslovakia’s postwar Communist regime, Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life flew in the face of the reigning aesthetic of socialist realism, an antiheroic novel informed by the literary theory of Viktor Shklovsky and constructed from episodes and lyrical sketches of the author and his neighbors’ everyday life in industrial north Bohemia, set against a backdrop of historical and cultural upheaval. Meditative and speculative reflections here alternate and overlap with fragmentary accounts of Josef Jedlicka’s own biography and slices of the lives of people around him, typically rendered as overheard conversations. The narrative passages range in chronology from May 1945 to the early 1950s, with sporadic leaps through time as the characters go about the business of “building a new society” and the mythology that goes with it. Due to its critical view of socialist society, Midway remained unpublished until 1966 when it emerged amid the easing of cultural control, but a complete version of this darkly comic novel did not appear in Czech until 1994.

'Happiness beyond all words! A life of peace and love, entire and whole!' A collection of cantos from Paradiso, the most original and experimental part of the Divina Commedia. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

The opening lines of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri launched Rod Dreher on a journey that rescued him from exile and saved his life. Dreher found that the medieval poem offered him a surprisingly practical way of solving modern problems. Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times bestselling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher spiraled into depression and a stress-related autoimmune disease. Doctors told Dreher that if he didn’t find inner peace, he would destroy his health. Soon after, he came across The Divine Comedy in a bookstore and was enchanted by its first lines, which seemed to describe his own condition. In the months that followed, Dante helped Dreher understand the mistakes and mistaken beliefs that had torn him down and showed him that he had the power to change his life. Dreher knows firsthand the solace and strength that can be found in Dante’s great work, and distills its wisdom for those who are lost in the dark wood of depression, struggling with failure (or success), wrestling with a crisis of faith, alienated from their families or communities, or otherwise enduring the sense of exile that is the human condition. Inspiring, revelatory, and packed with penetrating spiritual, moral, and psychological insights, How Dante Can Save Your Life is a book for people, both religious and secular, who find themselves searching for meaning and healing. Dante told his patron that he wrote his poem to bring readers from misery to happiness. It worked for Rod Dreher. Dante saved Rod Dreher’s life—and in this book, Dreher shows you how Dante can save yours.

"A Divine Comedy of our times."—John Irving, author of The World According to Garp "This book is a miracle.”—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao A 2022 ReLit Award Finalist • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 Following Original Prin, a NYTBR Editor’s Choice and Globe and Mail Best Book, Dante’s Indiana is an extraordinary journey through the divine comedies and tragedies of our time. Middle-aged, married, but living on his own, Prin has lost his way. Desperate for money and purpose, he moves to small-town Indiana to work for an evangelical millionaire who’s building a theme park inspired by Dante’s Inferno. He quickly becomes involved in the difficult lives of his co-workers and in the wider struggles of their opioid-ravaged community while trying to reconcile with his distant wife and distant God. Both projects spin out of control, and when a Black teenager is killed, creationists, politicians and protesters alike descend. In the midst of this American chaos, Prin risks everything to help the lost and angry souls around him while searching for his own way home. Affecting and strange, intimate and big-hearted, Dante’s Indiana is a darkly divine comedy for our time.

The Divine Comedy is widely considered to be the preeminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The narrative describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem represents the soul's journey towards God. Dante draws on medieval Christian theology and philosophy where the poet Virgil is presented as human reason and Beatrice is presented as divine knowledge. Thus, this edition brings to you the annotated translation of the Divine Comedy by Henry Francis Cary for a pleasant enjoyment of the world's greatest classic.

De Chirico (Instituto de Formazione Evangelica e Documentazione, Padova, Italy) begins by identifying the elastic contours of Evangelical theology in its contemporary outlook. Then he examines a number of Evangelical theologians who have interacted with Roman Catholicism in general and with Roman Catholic theology in particular over the past 40 sin

The best and most eloquent introduction to Dante for our time. Prue Shaw is one of the world's foremost authorities on Dante. Written with the general reader in mind, Reading Dante brings her knowledge to bear in an accessible yet expert introduction to his great poem. This is far more than an exegesis of Dante’s three-part Commedia. Shaw communicates the imaginative power, the linguistic skill and the emotional intensity of Dante’s poetry—the qualities that make the Commedia perhaps the greatest literary work of all time and not simply a medieval treatise on morality and religion. The book provides a graphic account of the complicated geography of Dante's version of the afterlife and a sure guide to thirteenth-century Florence and the people and places that influenced him. At the same time it offers a literary experience that lifts the reader into the universal realms of poetry and mythology, creating links not only to the classical world of Virgil and Ovid but also to modern art and poetry, the world of T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and many others. Dante's questions are our questions: What is it to be a human being? How should we judge human behavior? What matters in life and in death? Reading Dante helps the reader to understand Dante’s answers to these timeless questions and to see how surprisingly close they sometimes are to modern answers. Reading Dante is an astonishingly lyrical work that will appeal to both those who’ve never read the Commedia and those who have. It underscores Dante's belief that poetry can change human lives.