29 Best European Books

“Chwile zamyslenia” – Beata Pozniak, aktorka – tuz przed niespodziewana smiercia krewniaczki, Barbary Bukowskiej, otrzymuje wiersze napisane przez nia. Barbara “pisala tylko tak dla siebie”. Wiersze sa osobiste, rodzinne – autorka przeprowadza rozmowe ze swoja podswiadomoscia, z nadprzyrodzona sila, z Bogiem. Pozniak piszac Wstep do tomiku “Chwile zamyslenia”(ebook i paperback) i czytajac wiersze Bukowskiej (audiobook), przypomina nam wszystkim, zeby sie nie poddawac, czas doceniac, i…. jak autorka stwierdza, zeby “dobry slad pozostawic po sobie na ziemi”. A znow Andriej Siniawski utrzymuje, ze ,,Czlowiek rodzi sie w jednym egzemplarzu i kiedy ginie, nikt go nie moze zastapic.” Zatem kazdy z nas ma potencjal w sobie i cos do ofiarowania z siebie innym. Nalezy tylko znalezc to i dalej przekazywac maluczkim mieszkancom planety Ziemi.

Paradiso is the third and final part of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s epic poem describing man’s progress from hell to salvation. In it, the author progresses through nine concentric spheres of heaven. Corresponding with medieval astronomy, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn deal with the four cardinal virtues Prudence, Fortitude, Justice and Temperance. The remaining two spheres are the fixed stars and the Primum Mobile, containing the purely virtuous and the angels, followed by the Empyrean, or God itself, continuing the 9+1 theme that runs throughout the Divine Comedy. The Paradiso is more theological in nature than the Inferno and the Purgatorio, features encounters with several great saints, and finishes with the author’s soul becoming aligned with God’s love.

This collection, written between 1907 and 1920 by beloved children’s author A. A. Milne, contains the following essays: “Bruce: A Short Study of a Great Life?” The Charm of Golf The Cupboard On Going into a House Goldfish My Library The Old Order Changes The Pleasure of Writing Smoking as a Fine Art Thoughts on Thermometers” The University Boat Race A Word for Autumn The author of more than twenty-five plays, ten nonfiction books, seven novels, five children’s books, and four books of poetry, A. A. Milne was notable for more than just his creation of the Hundred Acre Wood. This collection illustrates just how Milne’s mind worked and offers witty, creative, and entertaining insight into his everyday life.

A remarkable hybrid of translation, adaptation, and invention

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,And on a beach aslant its shimmeringUpwards of 50,000 menAsleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

“Your life at every instant up for– / Gone. / And, candidly, who gives a toss? / Your heart beats strong. Your spirit grips,” writes Christopher Logue in his original version of Homer’s Iliad, the uncanny “translation of translations” that won ecstatic and unparalleled acclaim as “the best translation of Homer since Pope’s” (New York Review of Books).

Logue’s account of Homer’s Iliad is a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of Homer’s tale of warfare, human folly, and the power of the gods in language and verse that is emphatically modern and “possessed of a very terrible beauty” (Slate). Illness prevented him from bringing his version of the Iliad to completion, but enough survives in notebooks and letters to assemble a compilation that includes the previously published volumes War Music, Kings, The Husbands, All Day Permanent Red, and Cold Calls, along with previously unpublished material, in one final illuminating volume arranged by his friend and fellow poet Christopher Reid. The result, War Music, comes as near as possible to representing the poet’s complete vision and confirms what his admirers have long known: that “Logue’s Homer is likely to endure as one of the great long poems of the twentieth century” (Times Literary Supplement).

“I know of no writer on either side of the Atlantic who is better at exploring the human spirit under assault than Billy O’Callaghan.”–Robert Olen Butler

The prizewinning Irish short-story writer and author of the highly praised novel, My Coney Island Baby, delivers his most accomplished book of short fiction to date–a poignant story collection that “grips from the opening page” (Bernard MacLaverty).

These are twelve poignant, quietly dazzling, and carefully crafted stories that explore the resiliency of the human heart and its ability to keep beating in the wake of bereavement, violence, lost love, and incomparable trauma and grief.

Spanning a century and two continents, from the muddy fields of Ireland to a hotel room in Paris, a dingy bar in Segovia to an airplane bound for Taipei, The Boatman and Other Stories follows an unforgettable cast of characters. Three gunshots on the Irish border define the course of a young man’s life; a writer clings fast to a star-crossed affair with a woman who has never been fully within his reach; a fisherman accustomed to hard labor rolls up his sleeves to dig a grave for his child; and a pair of newlyweds embark on their first adventure, living wild on the deserted Beginish Island.

Ranging from the elegiac to the brutally confrontational, these densely layered tales reveal the quiet heroism and gentle dignity of ordinary life. Billy O’Callaghan is a master celebrant of the smallness of the human flame against the dark: its strength and its steady brightness.

“Leighton Pugh narrates this work as if it were an unsolved mystery…In a voice of nuanced emotion, Pugh creates muted characters to paint a vivid picture of what the author was up against as he tried to save his country.” — AudioFile Magazine

A Number One Sunday Times Bestseller transformed into an illuminating, dynamic audiobook.

What happens when you take on the establishment? In Adults in the Room, renowned economist and former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis gives the full, blistering account of his momentous clash with the mightiest economic and political forces on earth.

After being swept into power with the leftwing Syriza party, Varoufakis attempts to re-negotiate Greece’s relationship with the EU–and sparks a spectacular battle with global implications. Varoufakis’s new position sends him ricocheting between mass demonstrations in Athens, closed-door negotiations in drab EU and IMF offices, and furtive meetings with power-brokers in Washington, DC. He consults and quarrels with Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Christine Legarde, the economists Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sachs, and others, as he struggles to relieve Greece’s debt crisis without resorting to punishing austerity measures. But, despite the mass support of the Greek people and the simple logic of Varoufakis’s arguments, he succeeds only in provoking the fury of Europe’s elite.

Varoufakis’s unvarnished memoir is an urgent warning that the economic policies once embraced by the EU and the White House have failed–and spawned authoritarianism, populist revolt, and instability throughout the Western world.

Adults in the Room is an extraordinary tale of brinkmanship, hypocrisy, collusion, and betrayal that will shake the global establishment to its foundations.

A must-listen for anyone interested in current events and the delicate web of global economics.

C. S. Lewis offers a magisterial take on the literature and poetry of one of the most consequential periods in world history, providing deep insight into some of the greatest writers of the age, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Tyndale, John Knox, Dr. Johnson, Richard Hooker, Hugh Latimer, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and Thomas Cranmer.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century is an invigorating overview of English literature from the Norman Conquest through the mid-seventeenth century from one of the greatest public intellectuals of the modern age. In this wise, distinctive collection, C. S. Lewis expounds on the profound impact prose and poetry had on both British intellectual life and his own critical thinking and writing, demonstrated in his deep reflections and essays.

This incisive work is essential for any serious literature scholar, intellectual Anglophile, or C. S. Lewis fan.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

“The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a Modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!) and well worth the wait. These amazing texts from a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological, and literary importance, containing the lion’s share of information that survives today about the gods and heroes of pre-Christian Scandinavians, their unique vision of the beginning and end of the world, etc. Jackson Crawford’s modern versions of these poems are authoritative and fluent and often very gripping. With their individual headnotes and complementary general introduction, they supply today’s readers with most of what they need to know in order to understand and appreciate the beliefs, motivations, and values of the Vikings.”–Dick Ringler, Professor Emeritus of English and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

From the author of I Saw a Man comes a powerful drama in verse that captures both the trauma of modern warfare and the difficulty of transitioning back to normal life after combat.

In early 2008, three young friends from Bristol decide to join the army and are deployed to the conflict in Afghanistan. Within a short space of time the three men return to the women in their lives–a wife, a mother, a girlfriend–all of whom must now share the psychological and physical aftershocks of military service. Written from the points of view of each soldier, Sheers explores not only their experiences in the field of battle but also the grueling process of recovery following a debilitating injury, the strain of PTSD on a new marriage, and the emotional toll of survivor’s guilt among soldiers and their loved ones at home.

Drawing on interviews with soldiers and their families, Sheers illuminates the enduring human cost of war and its often devastating effect on the young lives pulled into its orbit. Pink Mist is a work of great dramatic power, documentary integrity, and emotional intensity.

One of the most distinctive periods in poetry occurred in England early in the 1800s. This is now referred to as the age of romanticism, a movement which rebelled against the neoclassical forms and celebrated the imagination as a spiritual force. John Keats was a prominent shaper of this new movement, and as such, he was not without his critics.

“I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death,” he soberly prophesied. Indeed, Keats suffered an early tragic death of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five but today is recognized as the archetypal romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses.

Unlike Shelley, Keats was not a political poet; his prime passion was for art. His muse was the goddess of beauty and truth, and his worship of her found its finest expression in his immortal odes, which stand unique in literature, unexcelled in perfection.

The poems collected here are: 1. “Oh Chatterton! How Very Sad Thy Fate” 2. “O Solitude! If I Must with Thee Dwell” 3. “To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent” 4. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” 5. “To My Brothers” 6. “Great Spirits Now on Earth Are Sojourning” 7. “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” 8. “After Dark Vapours Have Oppressed Our Plains” 9. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” 10. “On the Sea” 11. A Selection from “Endymion” 12. “To Mrs. Reynolds’ Cat” 13. “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again” 14. “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” 15. “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern” 16. “O Thou Whose Face Hath Felt the Winter’s Wind” 17. “For There’s Bishop’s Teign” 18. “On Visiting the Tomb of Burns” 19. “Old Meg She Was a Gipsey” 20. “This Mortal Body of a Thousand Days” 21. “There Is a Joy in Footing Slow across a Silent Plain” 22. “The Eve of St. Mark” 23. “Why Did I Laugh Tonight? No Voice Will Tell” 24. “Bright Star, Would I Were Stedfast as Thou Art” 25. “Hyperion: A Fragment” (Book I), II, and III) 26. “Hyperion: A Fragment” (Book I, continued; Book II, Book III) 27. “La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad” 28. “Sonnet to Sleep” 29. “Ode to Psyche” 30. “Ode to a Nightingale” 31. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 32. “Ode on Melancholy” 33. “Ode on Indolence” 34. “Lamia” (Part I) 35. “Lamia” (Part I, continued; Part II) 36. “To Autumn” 37. “The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream” 38. “This Living Hand, Now Warm and Capable”

The World according to Narnia is a lively and engaging exploration of the many Christian themes in C. S. Lewis’ widely-known and universally loved children’s stories. C. S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia with a Christian understanding of the world firmly in his mind. Thus, it is no surprise that at every turn, some character or incident reflects parts of the Christian story. From the Creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew, to The Last Battle, which presents the Christian view of heaven, Lewis intended these stories to say something new and imaginative about Christianity.

Jonathan Rogers unfolds the parallels between Lewis’ seven-book series and Christian theology, pointing out similarities between events in Narnia and in Scripture. Whether you’re new to the Chronicles or you’ve just finished The Last Battle, this book will expand your understanding and appreciation for Lewis’ beloved classics.

Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night. Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom’s barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men’s blood.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) wrote these words in August 1944, as Paris was being liberated from German occupation. Although best known for his novels including The Stranger and The Plague, it was his vivid descriptions of the horrors of the occupation and
his passionate defense of freedom that in fact launched his public fame.

Now, for the first time in English, Camus at ‘Combat’ presents all of Camus’ World War II resistance and early postwar writings published in Combat, the resistance newspaper where he served as editor-in-chief and editorial writer between 1944 and 1947.

These 165 articles and editorials show how Camus’ thinking evolved from support of a revolutionary transformation of postwar society to a wariness of the radical left alongside his longstanding strident opposition to the reactionary right. These are poignant depictions
of issues ranging from the liberation, deportation, justice for collaborators, the return of POWs, and food and housing shortages, to the postwar role of international institutions, colonial injustices, and the situation of a free press in democracies. The ideas that shaped
the vision of this Nobel Prize-winning novelist and essayist are on abundant display.

More than fifty years after the publication of these writings, they have lost none of their force. They still speak to us about freedom, justice, truth, and democracy.

From the translator of the bestselling Poetic Edda comes a gripping new rendering of two of the greatest sagas of Old Norse literature. Together the two sagas recount the story of seven generations of a single legendary heroic family and comprise our best source of traditional lore about its members–including, among others, the dragon slayer Sigurd, Brynhild the Valkyrie, and the Viking chieftain Ragnar Lothbrok.

Bring history back to life through Jim Hodges’ historically accurate, exciting and edifying audio recordings.

Victor Hugo wrote in his classic Les Mis+(r)rables, Book 5, Chapter 4: “God is behind everything, but everything hides God.” I don’t know if you have seen either the stage musical or the movie rendition of Victor Hugo’s immortal classic Les Mis+(r)rables (an epic story of redemption set in Paris after the French Revolution) but I have never seen a production that more clearly illustrates the saving grace of God and the change that can be had for anyone willing to accept it.

This 1937 Old Time Radio Show dramatization, written, produced, and performed by none other than the incomparable Orson Wells, of “War of the Worlds” fame. The story is faithfully retold (with questionable subjects carefully camouflaged) and is suitable for students aged 10 and older. This live recording, masterfully performed by an incredible professional cast, includes sound effects, music, and an unforgettable story. You will not be disappointed.

Look for the Old Time Radio Show Collection from the 30s, 40s, and 50s! These classic stories will capture your attention as they reenact history in short programs.

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) is one of the most popular and enduring of the English poets. His poetry is beloved for its deep feeling, its use of ordinary speech, and its celebration of nature and of the beauty and poetry in the commonplace. Together with his friend, the poet and political activist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth helped launch the romantic age in English literature. These poems demonstrate the astonishing range and beauty of Wordsworth’s work and his sustained, coherent vision.

This poem describes a battle with a fearsome beast called “The Jabberwock” and is considered to be one of the greatest nonsense poems written in the English language. The poem is included in Lewis Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In an early scene in that novel, Alice discovers a book that is written backwards. Realizing that she’s in the inverted “looking-glass land,” she holds the book up to a mirror and is able to read the poem “Jabberwocky,” but she finds it to be just as nonsensical and perplexing as the world around her.

The epitome of the Romantic literary hero, Lord Byron was as well-known in his time for the revolutionary panache with which he lived as for his extremely popular verse. “As a myth,” wrote Bertrand Russell, “his importance, especially on the continent, was enormous.” His many tempestuous relationships were the subject of scandal which only added to his celebrity. His name has even entered into our language to describe a man of deep passion and defiance.

Satirical, shocking, romantic, and dramatic, Byron’s poetry is replete with witticisms, surprise rhymes, and editorial comment.

Poems in this collection include: 1. From “Don Juan” 2. From “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” 3. “The Destruction of Sennacherib” 4. “She Walks in Beauty” 5. “Remember Thee! Remember Thee!” 6. “To Thomas Moore” 7. “So, We’ll Go No More a Roving” 8. “Epigrams” 9. “Churchill’s Grave” 10. “Epistle to Augusta” 11. “Lines on Hearing That Lady Byron Was Ill” 12. “Beppo” 13. “The Vision of Judgment” 14. “The Spell Is Broke, the Charm Is Flown!”

La Reine Margot is a novel of suspense and drama which recreates the violent world of intrigue, murder, and duplicity of the French Renaissance. Dumas fills his canvas with a gallery of unforgettable characters, unremitting action, and the engaging generosity of spirit which has made him one of the world’s greatest and best-loved storytellers.

A groundbreaking biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant’s son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the center of political life?yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer’s adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer’s travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer’s experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter’s nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer’s writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant’s son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales.

A gripping narrative history of Spain’s most brilliant and troubled literary family–a tale about the making of art, myth, and legacy–set against the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War and beyond.

In this absorbing and atmospheric historical narrative, journalist Aaron Shulman takes us deeply into the circumstances surrounding the Spanish Civil War through the lives, loves, and poetry of the Paneros, Spain’s most compelling and eccentric family, whose lives intersected memorably with many of the most storied figures in the art, literature, and politics of the time–from Neruda to Salvador Dali, from Ava Gardner to Pablo Picasso to Roberto Bolano.

Weaving memoir with cultural history and biography, and brought together with vivid storytelling and striking images, The Age of Disenchantments sheds new light on the romance and intellectual ferment of the era while revealing the profound and enduring devastation of the war, the Franco dictatorship, and the country’s transition to democracy.

A searing tale of love and hatred, art and ambition, and freedom and oppression, The Age of Disenchantments is a chronicle of a family who modeled their lives (and deaths) on the works of art that most inspired and obsessed them and who, in turn, profoundly affected the culture and society around them.

Although the poet John Donne lived so long ago, some phrases from his writing still linger with us today, such as “no man is an island,” “death be not proud,” and “for whom the bell tolls,” which provided the title for one of Ernest Hemingway’s novels.

John Donne used poems as a means of metaphysical inquiry and meditation as well as for very sensual expression. His daringly original use of imagery and conceits to lead the mind to profound understandings marked a new, intellectual approach to poetry. Like Shakespeare, Donne was a genius at making common words yield up rich, poetic meaning. His thought is complex, but his poems unfold in a logical way.

This collection includes songs, satires, elegies, selections from The Anniversaries, and divine poems.

Contents are:

I. Divine Poems “Resurrection, Imperfect” “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” “From the Lamentations of Jeremy” “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” “A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s Last Going into Germany” “A Hymn to God the Father”

II. From The Anniversaries “An Anatomy of the World” “Of the Progress of the Soul”

III. Songs, Satires, Elegies “The Expiration” “The Computer” “The Bait” “Song” “Love’s Deity” “Woman’s Contancy” “The Indifferent” “Community” “The Curse” “The Flea” “The Message” “The Apparition” “The Broken Heart” “Break of Day” “Confined Love” “From Sappho to Philaenis” “To His Mistress Going to Bed (Elegy 19)” “The Good Morrow” “The Sun Rising” “Jealousy (Elegy 1)” “Love’s Exchange” “The Will” “Satire 2” “Satire 3” “From Metempsychosis” “The Storm” “The Calm” “To Sir Henry Wotton” “His Picture (Elegy 5” “On His Mistress (Elegy 16)” “The Dream” “The Prohibition” “The Canonization” “Air and Angels” “The Ecstasy” “A Fever” “Lover’s Infiniteness” “The Anniversary” “A Valediciton: of Weeping” “Song” “A Valediciton: Forbidding Mouring” “The Undertaking” “The Funeral” “The Relic” “Twicknam Garden” “A Lecture upon the Shadow” “A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day” “The Autumnal (Elegy 9)”

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” —from “Auguries of Innocence”

At the end of his life, William Blake gave up hope of being widely understood, but the twentieth century brought his work a new and intense interest and acclaim. A poet, artist, and mystic, Blake declared that “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another Man’s.” And create he did.

Included in this collection are well-known poems such as “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright” and “A Poison Tree,” longer poems such as “The Everlasting Gospel,” an assortment of epigrams and short satire, and Blake’s principal prose work, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels achieved stunning global success in part because of the mystery surrounding their pseudonymous author. English-speaking readers were tantalized by her enigmatic biography as well as what they took to be her authentic portrayal of working-class Naples. However, we now know that the person behind the writing is most likely Anita Raja, a prominent translator of German literature whose background is very different from Ferrante’s supposed life.

In Finding Ferrante, Alessia Ricciardi revisits questions about Ferrante’s identity to show how the problem of authorship is deeply intertwined with the novels’ literary ambition and politics. Going beyond the local and national cultures of Naples and Italy, Ricciardi reads Ferrante’s fiction as world literature, foregrounding Raja’s work as a translator. She examines the novels’ engagement with German literature and criticism, particularly Goethe, Walter Benjamin, and Christa Wolf, while also tracing the influence of Italian thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Carla Lonzi, and the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective. Considering central questions of sexuality, work, politics, and place, Ricciardi demonstrates how intertextual resonances reshape our understanding of Lila and Elena, the protagonists of the Neapolitan Quartet, as well as the characters and language of Ferrante’s other books.

This bold reconsideration of one of today’s most acclaimed authors reveals Ferrante’s works as fiercely intellectual, showing their deep concern with feminist and cultural politics and the ethical and political stakes of literature.

Numerous biographies have been written about this great theologian, literary critic, and novelist, but we have found this to be the best.

Sayer describes Lewis’ early years, hinting at childhood evidence of the brilliance and eccentricity that would later become Lewis’ hallmarks. He discusses Lewis’ academic career, his life-transforming conversion to Christianity, and the role of religion in his life. With honesty and compassion, he covers Lewis’ controversial relationship with Mrs. Moore and his passionate marriage to Joy Davidman.

Blackstone Audio presents a new recording of this classic masterpiece, originally published in 1320, read by award-winning narrator Ralph Cosham.

No words can describe the greatness of this work, a greatness both of theme and of artistry. Dante’s theme is universal; it involves the greatest concepts that man has ever attained. Only a genius could have found the loftiness of tone and the splendor and variety of images that are presented in The Divine Comedy.

The story is an allegory representing the soul’s journey from spiritual depths to spiritual heights. As mankind exposes itself, by its merits or demerits, to the rewards or the punishments of justice, it experiences “Inferno” or hell, “Purgatorio” or purgatory, and “Paradiso” or heaven, a vision of a world of beauty, light, and song. Dante’s arduous journey through the circles of hell make for an incredibly moving human drama, and a single listen will reveal the power of Dante’s imagination to make the spiritual visible.

In this edition, “Inferno” is translated by John Aitken Carlyle, “Purgatorio,” by Thomas Okey, and “Paradiso” by Philip H. Wicksteed.

Paradiso is the third and final part of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s epic poem describing man’s progress from hell to salvation. In it, the author progresses through nine concentric spheres of heaven. Corresponding with medieval astronomy, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn deal with the four cardinal virtues Prudence, Fortitude, Justice and Temperance. The remaining two spheres are the fixed stars and the Primum Mobile, containing the purely virtuous and the angels, followed by the Empyrean, or God itself, continuing the 9+1 theme that runs throughout the Divine Comedy. The Paradiso is more theological in nature than the Inferno and the Purgatorio, features encounters with several great saints, and finishes with the author’s soul becoming aligned with God’s love.

Purgatorio is the second part of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s epic poem describing man’s progress from hell to paradise. Having escaped the Inferno, Dante and his guide, the classical Roman poet Virgil, ascend out of the underworld to the Mountain of Purgatory on an island on the far side of the world. The mountain has nine terraces, seven of which correspond to the seven deadly sins, and two of which constitute an Ante-Purgatory with the Garden of Eden at the summit. Dante writes about sin based on motives in Purgatory, rather than actions as in The Inferno, giving the book a more psychological aspect. Arriving on Easter Sunday, Purgatorio represents the time of human life on earth.

William Butler Yeats, the first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is not only one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century but one of the most widely read. The landscape, myths, legends, and folklore of his homeland lie at the heart of his poetic imagination, and the unique musicality of Ireland adds to the richness of his verse. But the themes of his poetry are universal and timeless: the conflict between life and death, love and hate, and the meaning of man’s existence in an imperfect world.

This collection includes such favorites as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “When You Are Old,” as well as two of his longer narrative works, “The Old Age of Queen Maeve” and “Baile and Aillinn.” It traces the poet’s artistry from his early days as a dreamy, late-romantic poet into one of the most individual and visionary voices of twentieth-century verse.