Fiction Archives - Dante Today

Requiem of the Crazies Comics (2018)

October 23, 2021 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

“A young troubled man who finds himself living on the streets with a gun in his mouth and nowhere to go is given hope for a new life when he is taken in by a streetwise bum named Vern. Dante is introduced to the underground world of the homeless, the Crazies, where a bum can stay for the month of May and won’t need any money. A sanctuary for all those who have been forsaken. . . If only it were that easy. When corrupt politicians, drug dealers and an insane cult leader begin fighting for power, the meek homeless become nothing more than pawns in a malicious game of power. “I thought being homeless would be really easy,” Dante thinks, as him and Vern set off on their journey to fight the evil forces bent on corrupting the minds of the homeless. ” [. . .] –Rusty Cage, Indiegogo (retrieved October 18, 2021)

The series was started by Rusty Cage in 2018 and is currently on the third of eight planned installments.

La Comedia Nova di Andrea Chiarelli (2021)

October 17, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“La Comedia Nova è il racconto in versi del ritorno di Dante nell’aldilà e la scoperta di un mondo nuovo e nuovi personaggi. Dante viene riportato nel loco etterno sotto la guida illuminata di Voltaire, che lo presenta a personaggi che sono vissuti dopo la vita mortale di Dante: da Cristoforo Colombo a Neil Armstrong, da Leonardo a Christiaan Barnard, da Galileo a Margherita Hack.

“Dante scopre che l’aldilà non è più organizzato nei tre tradizionali regni: Inferno, Purgatorio e Paradiso. Ora vige tutta un’altra organizzazione ed un altro modo di intendere premi e punizioni.

“La Comedia Nova è scritta seguendo lo stesso stile della Divina Commedia. È un poema di dodici canti scritto in terzine dantesche (terzine incatenate di endecasillabi), con un linguaggio che si ispira a quello di Dante, ma non troppo.” —La Comedia Nova

Mohammad Rabie, Otared (2016)

August 27, 2021 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“2025: fourteen years after the failed revolution, Egypt is invaded once more. As traumatized Egyptians eke out a feral existence in Cairo’s dusty downtown, former cop Ahmed Otared joins a group of fellow officers seeking Egypt’s liberation through the barrel of a gun. As Cairo becomes a foul cauldron of drugs, sex, and senseless violence, Otared finally understands his country’s fate. In this unflinching and grisly novel, Mohammad Rabie envisages a grim future for Egypt, where death is the only certainty.” —Amazon. (this dystopian, apocalyptic science fiction novel is organized in line with Dante’s circles of Hell)

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)

March 30, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“Dinaw Mengestu belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and intentional, if sometimes forced, migrations. These are the writer-immigrants coming here from Africa, East India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Their struggles for identity mark a new turn within the ranks of American writers I like to call ‘the in-betweeners.’ The most interesting work in American literature has often been done by such writers, their liminality and luminosity in American culture produced by changing national definitions (Twain, Kerouac, Ginsberg), by being the children of immigrants themselves (Bellow, Singer), by voluntary exile (Baldwin, Hemingway) and by trauma (Bambara, Morrison).

[. . .]

“Judith, a white woman who moves into the predominantly black Logan Circle, becomes Sepha’s Beatrice, and, as with Dante, she leads him from his exile to purgatory and, eventually, to redemption. They meet over the counter in Sepha’s store, which is where all the community eventually comes together – to buy, to hang out, to shoplift, to receive and pass along gossip. Sepha’s relationship with Judith is facilitated by the wonderful connection he has to Judith’s precocious daughter, Naomi. And like Dante and Beatrice, they have a love that remains fraught and unconsummated but powerful and transformative nonetheless. Part of the difficulty is that Judith represents the new wave of gentrification and Sepha’s decision to date her is seen as an act of betrayal by the other residents. Neighborhood tensions build because of Judith (since she symbolizes the oppressor), and her home is firebombed by local thugs. Sepha’s own redemption and the choice he makes in this matter are what shape his new self.” –Chris Abani, “Dante, Beatrice in a narrative of immigration,” The Baltimore Sun (March 11, 2007)

Contributed by Francesco Ciabattoni (Georgetown University)

Adoyo, Rain: A Song for All and None (2020)

March 10, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Adoyo’s Rain: A Song for All and None is a genre-crossing novel published by Zamani Chronicles in 2020. Rain is at the same time the oral history of several generations of a fictional Kenyan family, centered on Maya, a Dream Walker—endowed with a clairvoyance that grants Dreamers a cross-temporal empathic vision of human history—and an incisive interrogation of the history of colonial conquest in Africa. In the “Afterword” Adoyo (a scholar and teacher of Dante) describes the relationship of the novel’s relationship to the Divine Comedy:

“And each of the multitude voices and stories flowing into Rain is a vital tributary to a dynamic polyphony that explores and illuminates the conflict between sanitized histories of colonialist aggression and the unvarnished accounts of their savagery. It will not surprise readers familiar with the voice of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia that the Great Poet’s most important animating influence in Rain is the way it emboldens this story to draw back the veil of recorded History and bear witness, with an unflinching and conscientious gaze, to the brutality of the agents of colonial dominion — figures celebrated for the Age of Discovery whose incursions wreaked unconscionable horrors on peoples around the world for Coin in the name of Church and Crown and set the precedent for presumptuous appropriations like the Scramble for Africa centuries later. The poetic voice of Dante artifex also permeates the comprehensive structure of Rain, from its general architecture to the network of internal memory manifest in the story’s narrative refrains, as well as the musical rhythm and flow of the storyteller’s language. The most dulcet tones of Dante’s voice resonate deeply in the contemplative strains of Rain devoted to singing the unspoiled beauty of Nature in the bounty of Africa’s expansive savanna grasslands, gleaming equatorial mountain glaciers, opulent Rift Valley, cascading waters and wending rivers, and shimmering Great Lakes.” –From the “Afterword” of Adoyo’s Rain: A Song for All and None (Zamani Chronicles, 2020)

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