Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
“The Alaskan Sting is the story of a young man from San Francisco who has two vices: drinking and women. His adventure starts when his cousin gives him a ten-day vacation to Alaska, but, on the way, he experiences several misfortunes. Find out what happens as this young man earns a moral conclusion as he gets caught in a government sting operation.” –John Herold, Amazon, January 20, 2012
“Enigmatic and sexy, Professor Gabriel Emerson is a well-respected Dante specialist by day, but by night he devotes himself to an uninhibited life of pleasure. He uses his notorious good looks and sophisticated charm to gratify his every whim, but is secretly tortured by his dark past and consumed by the profound belief that he is beyond all hope of redemption.
[. . .]
An intriguing and sinful exploration of seduction, forbidden love, and redemption, Gabriel’s Inferno is a captivating and wildly passionate tale of one man’s escape from his own personal hell as he tries to earn the impossible: forgiveness and love.” —Amazon, September 4, 2012
The Dante Inferno: Draco’s Marriage Pact was written by Day Leclaire and will be published by DLI Publishing on April 17th, 2020.
“When Draco Dante experiences The Inferno with Dante family rival, Shayla Charleston, he isn’t the least opposed. In fact, he sweeps her off her feet and straight into his bed. What he doesn’t expect is for her to disappear after their one night of passion. Unwilling to let her go and with The Inferno burning in his veins, he spends months searching for her … only to discover Shayla is expecting his baby. Like, now!
“On the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday, Shayla Charleston has three goals. 1. Make sure her grandmother is taken care of. 2. Take off for Europe with her new boss. 3. Experience a one-night stand. Instead, she ends up in bed with the one man she should avoid at all costs … a Dante, her grandmother’s nemesis. [. . .]
“Draco’s Marriage Pact is Book #7 in The Dante Inferno: the Dante Dynasty Series, a contemporary romance series by USA Today bestselling author and eleven-time RITA© (Romance Writers of America) finalist, Day Leclaire. This story features passionate Italian-American heroes, the scorching connection of The Inferno, and a sizzling romance between soul mates.” —Amazon
The Dante Conspiracy was written by James Becker and published by Canelo Adventure (May 28th, 2018).
“When the body of a poetry professor is found tortured in a deserted barn outside Florence, Inspector Perini is assigned to the case.
“No murder of passion, it is clearly a professional job. When, hours later, thieves break into Dante’s cenotaph, it seems the two crimes may be connected by some missing verses from the Divine Comedy.
“They could contain a code so valuable someone is willing to murder for it. But who? And why? As the bodies pile up, Perini is in a deadly race to find the secret before the killers. The truth will prove more shocking than he could have possibly imagined…” [. . .] —Amazon
“This spiritual guidebook follows in the footsteps of Dante on his journey through the Divine Comedy. A fresh, modern take on this path, the book invites us to explore these questions: what is my hell and how do I move through it? What is my purgatory and what lesson do I need to take away? What is my paradise; how do I get there and how do I stay there? With wisdom distilled from the great myths, scriptures, and the world’s mystics, this book is an invitation to ever-greater awakening and wholeness” [. . .] —Amazon
Dante’s Road was written by Marc Thomas Shaw and published by Amanchara Books on February 27th, 2019.
“Allowing for translation, those are the immortal opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Here, some seven centuries later, are some of Lynn Darling’s opening lines from her new memoir, Out of the Woods: ‘The summer my only child left home for college, I moved from an apartment in New York City, to live alone in a small house at the end of a dirt road in the woods of central Vermont.'” —Maureen Corrigan, Connecticut Public Radio, January 9, 2014
Learn more about Lynn Darling’s 2014 book Out of the Woods here.
Out of the Woods can be found on Amazon.
“La Divina Avventura è un libro illustrato, in versi, che potete trovare nella vostra libreria di fiducia in tutta Italia.
“La Divina Avventura è la Divina Commedia vista con gli occhi dei bambini e delle bambine, con gli occhi dei ragazzi e delle ragazze.
“Anzi, meglio ancora, ascoltata con le orecchie dei più piccoli perché il testo in versi è scritto per essere letto ad alta voce da mamme, papà, nonne, nonni, zii e da chiunque altro voglia tuffarsi nelle incredibili avventure vissute da Dante Alighieri attraverso i tre regni magici.” [. . .] —La Divina Avventura website, 2019.
You can purchase a copy of La Divina Avventura by Enrico Cerni, Francesca Gambino, and Maria Distefano here.
Contributed by Enrico Cerni.
“In John Barr’s poems, the ancient masters encounter the modern world. Dante on a beach in China beholds the Inferno: ‘Flaring well gas night and day, / towers rise as if to say, / Pollution can be beautiful.’ Bach’s final fugue informs all of nature. Villon is admonished by an aging courtesan. Aristotle finds ‘Demagogues are the insects of politics. / Like water beetles they stay afl oat / on surface tension, they taxi on iridescence.’ And his afterlife: ‘When three-headed Cerberus greeted him / Socrates replied: I won’t need / an attack dog, thank you. I married one.'” [. . .] —Red Hen Press, 2018.
You can purchase a copy of Dante in China on Indiebound.
David Szalay’s All That Man Is, published in 2017 by Vintage, tells the stories of nine different men at varying stages of life, and explores the issues and psych of the 21st century man. The book was a finalist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, and the winner of the 2016 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction. The fourth story of the novel cites the first three lines of the Inferno, as the story’s protagonist, a medieval scholar in crisis, drives into a pine forest.
“Pine forests on hillsides start to envelop them on the east side of the Main. And fog.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Ché la diritta via era smarrita
“Well, here it is. Dark pine forests, hemming the motorway. Shapes of fog throw themselves at the windscreen.” [. . .] –David Szalay, All That Man Is (p. 146).
You can purchase Szalay’s book here.
“Some years ago, I entered a contest put on my Platinum Studios which would award it’s winner a contract with their publishing arm. The property was what became the graphic novel, Haven. If you’re not familiar with the property, you can find out more by clicking here.
“I’ve told the story before about how it started out as a prose novel when Markosia Enterprises took notice of it and wanted to produce it as a graphic novel. But between the time I had written the treatment and the time Markosia took interest, I had entered it into the aforementioned contest. Unfortunately, it didn’t win but that’s OK. What I did win in the process was an awesome friendship that has lasted years with who was one of the top dogs of Platinum Studios at the time, Dan Forcey. If you don’t know Dan, he’s a Co-Producer of Cowboys & Aliens. Dan’s been an awesome source of encouragement for me over the years and loves the property.
“So do I.
“I’m not trying to sound like an egomaniac but like most writers I do pour out my heart and soul into a project so that it is relatable and has depth, purpose and in this case, history. The Dante’s history span centuries so this is a story that could go on forever. And there is still lots of story to tell. As with all new properties, it’s a tough sale….especially with a female protagonist. Don’t ask me why, you’d be preaching to the choir about that one.” […] –Leonardo Ramirez, “Where is Haven of Dante today?,” Leonardoverse, August 2019
