Purgatorio

Purgatorio is the second part of Italian poet Dante Alighieri's epic poem Divine Comedy and describes Dante's climb up the Mount of Purgatory. As in the Inferno, the Roman poet Virgil is guiding Dante on a journey; this time they visit the seven terraces of Purgatory, where sinners are cleansing themselves in preparation for entering Paradise. Each of the terraces represents one of the seven deadly sins, ranging from pride to lust. Through this allegory, Dante conveys that repentant souls can be redeemed. Dante wrote his narrative poem between 1308 and 1321. This version is taken from a 1901 English edition, featuring British author Rev. H. F. Cary's blank verse translation and woodcut illustrations by French artist Gustave Doré.

In his introduction to THE INFERNO, the translator says: "I suppose that a very great majority of English-speaking people, if they were asked to name the greatest epic poet of the Christian era in Western Europe, would answer Dante." THE DIVINE COMEDY continues to be widely read today, whether for its religious inspiration or for the sheer power of its verse. In the second part of the epic, THE PURGATORIO, Dante climbs out of the pit of Hell with the guidance of the ancient Roman poet, Virgil, who then takes him on a journey up the mountain of Purgatory. Here we find the souls of those who died in sin, but whose transgressions have not placed them irredeemably beyond the saving grace of God's mercy. Sooner or later, they WILL reach Heaven. A first-rate English-language rendition of a classic of western literature.

A mesmerizing first novel about a man, a woman, and a disappearance. "I'm from Chicago originally. I went to New York, married a girl named Anne, and was in the middle of living happily ever after when something happened." So begins John Haskell's mesmerizing first novel, American Purgatorio, the story of a happily married man who discovers, as he walks out of a convenience store, that his life has suddenly vanished. In cool, precise prose, written as both a detective story and a meditation on the seven deadly sins, Haskell tells a story that is by turns tragic and comic, compassionate and gripping. From the brownstones of New York City to the sandy beaches of Southern California, American Purgatorio follows the journey of a man whose object of desire is both heartbreaking and ephemeral. It confirms John Haskell's reputation as one of our most intriguing new writers, "one of those rare authors who makes language seem limitless in its possibilities" (Susan Reynolds, Los Angeles Times).

Invest your time in reading the true masterpieces of world literature, the great works of the greatest masters of their craft, the revolutionary works, the timeless classics and the eternally moving poetry of words and storylines every person should experience in their lifetime: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen) A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) Dubliners (James Joyce) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) Howards End (E. M. Forster) Le Père Goriot (Honoré de Balzac) Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) Anne of Green Gables Series (L. M. Montgomery) The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame) Gitanjali (Rabindranath Tagore) Diary of a Nobody (Grossmith) The Beautiful and Damned (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne) Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper) Peter and Wendy (J. M. Barrie) The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas) Iliad & Odyssey (Homer) Kama Sutra Dona Perfecta (Benito Pérez Galdós) The Divine Comedy (Dante) The Rise of Silas Lapham (William Dean Howells) The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura) Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo) Red and the Black (Stendhal) Rob Roy (Walter Scott) Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope) Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome) Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) My Antonia (Willa Cather) The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton) The Awakening (Kate Chopin) Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis) The Four Just Men (Edgar Wallace) Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham) The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev) The Voyage Out (Virginia Woolf) Life is a Dream (Pedro Calderon de la Barca) Faust (Goethe) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche) Autobiography (Benjamin Franklin) The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

In this accessible critical introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy Robin Kirkpatrick principally focuses on Dante as a poet and storyteller. He addresses important questions such as Dante's attitude towards Virgil, and demonstrates how an early work such as the Vita nuova is a principal source of the literary achievement of the Comedy. His detailed reading reveals how the great narrative poem explores the relationship that Dante believed to exist between God as creator of the universe and the human being as a creature of God.

This new critical volume contains commentary on the 'Purgatorio' by 33 international scholars, each of whom presents to the nonspecialist reader one of the cantos of the transitional middle cantica of Dante's unique Christian epic.