San Antonio College Library

It is at once a vision of the other world, an allegory of Christian life, a spiritual autobiography, and a cyclopaedic embodiment of all knowledge of its day.

"Award-winning poet Mary Jo Bang has translated the Inferno at a moment when popular culture is so prevalent that it has even taken Dante, author of the fourteenth-century epic poem The Divine Comedy, and turned him into an action-adventure video game hero. Dante wrote his poem in the vernacular, rather than in literary Latin. Bang has similarly created an idiomatically rich contemporary version that is accessible, musical, and audacious. She's matched...

As the collection's title suggests, time's passage is the fil rouge of these stories. All of Tabucchi's characters struggle to find routes of escape from a present that is hard to bear, and from places in which political events have had deeply personal ramifications for their own lives.

"Spanning six generations and three continents, My Name, a Living Memory is a novel based on theoretic saga of author Giorgio van Straten's family from the Napoleonic era through World War II. The story begins in Rotterdam in 1811, when Hartog son of Alexander - father, cucumber salesman, and Dutch Jew - is forced by Napoleonic edict to choose a last name. He chooses Straaten, the Dutch word for "street."" "The name presages a journey through history...

The story of two brothers whose Italian restaurant is on the brink of bankruptcy. Their only chance for success is to risk everything they own on an extravagant feast for bandleader Louis Prima. But their big night is complicated by a lovers' triangle, a sneaky restaurant rival, and the hilarious perfection of chef Primo.

"Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter and architect, is among the few people recognized as a genius in their own time. He is also the first major artist in the Western tradition to have left a significant body of poetry." "Written mainly in the form of sonnets, madrigals and quatrains, the poems encompass love, beauty, moral endeavour, the quest for salvation, and the ravages of death and time. They reveal a highly vulnerable personality, dependent...

In 1631 the Catholic Church in Spain placed this bawdy tale of earthly love on its Index of Prohibited Books. Victorian critics self-righteously censured it as "profligate and disgusting." No wonder: Written immediately after The Decameron, The Corbaccio (or the evil crow"), Boccaccio's final work, is a connoisseur's collection of traditional and medieval misogyny. In his introduction, Cassell situates The Corbaccio within literary, stylistic, and...