About this item
In the aftermath of a heartbreaking tragedy, a scholar and writer uses Dante's Divine Comedy to shepherd him through the dark wood of grief and mourning - a rich and emotionally resonant memoir of suffering, hope, love, and the power of literature to inspire and heal the most devastating loss.Where do we turn when we lose everything? Joseph Luzzi found the answer in the opening of The Divine Comedy: "In the middle of our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood."When Luzzi's pregnant wife was in a car accident - and died forty-five minutes after giving birth to their daughter, Isabel - he finds himself a widower and first-time father at the same moment. While he grieves and cares for his infant daughter, miraculously delivered by caesarean before his wife passed, he turns to Dante's Divine Comedy for solace.
About the Author
Joseph Luzzi holds a doctorate from Yale and teaches at Bard. He is the author of the memoir, IN A DARK WOOD: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (HarperCollins) , a meditation on the power of great literature to guide us in our most difficult times. Other books include MY TWO ITALIES (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) , the dramatic story of his Italian family's immigration and an insider's look at life in Italy, past and present.
An active critic, Luzzi has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, the Times Literary Supplement, and many others. His first book, ROMANTIC EUROPE AND THE GHOST OF ITALY (Yale) , received the MLA's Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies, and he is also the author of A CINEMA OF POETRY: Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (Johns Hopkins) . His work has been translated or is forthcoming in Italian, German, Portuguese, and Korean, and he lectures widely on art, film, and literature.
