We’ve just gotten our fall catalog in house and we couldn’t be happier.
So many wonderful, beautiful books!

Reading Dan Brown’s Inferno? Check out the blog “Facing the Inferno: 60 Days in Dan Brown’s Hell” to learn more about Dante and his original poem, some really interesting info!

Here is a taste (used with permission, of course!):

Dan Brown’s novel, Inferno, arrived in Tuesday’s mail. There was an embargo on this book – no one in the media was permitted to review it until the actual publication date (May 14, 2013). So now, hundreds of book reviewers and bloggers are speedily reading it in order to post their thoughts to the world. Some of them even stayed up all night long to speed read and then post.

We will take it slower. This blog is not where you will go to find a synopsis of Dan Brown’s Inferno. You can find that almost anywhere. Instead, this is where you will come if you want to explore what Brown has to say about Dante, the poet, and Dante’s famous poem.

It won’t surprise you that Dan Brown gets a lot of things wrong. Or that he twists and imagines ideas and events that did not actually happen in order to enhance his fictional narrative. We will point out some of these things, here. But most of all, we will explore the real Dante.

April is National Poetry Month. Here is a mid-month reminder of how poetry can touch us in a way that we cannot explain.

Ranier Maria Rilke is most famous for his Letters to a Young Poet, exchanged between 1902 and 1908 with Franz Kappus, a 19-year old military cadet seeking guidance for his poetry.

The poem below is excerpted from a new book, Prayers of a Young Poet, a collection of earlier works Rilke wrote in 1899 after returning to Germany from his first trip to Russia.

We grasp You only in what we do,
illuminate You only with our hands;
our every sense is but a guest here,
yearning to reach beyond the world.

Every sense is conceived;
one feels its elegant hem,
and knows someone spun it—
but heaven surrenders itself
because it cannot choose.

I don’t want to know where You are;
speak to me from every place.
Your willing evangelist distorts
everything, and in his forgetting
neglects to look for the resonance.

But I’m always approaching You
with all my coming;
yet who am I and who are You
when neither of us understands the other?