Books like Marx's Inferno — picked by fans

This book rocked my theory-world when I finally settled down to read it, long after it was first published and everybody was talking about it. Besides developing Marx’s idea of the ‘metabolic rift’ in the social-natural metabolism, brought on by the industrial revolution, it also traces Marx’s inspiration in the soil sciences of his day, ancient materialist philosophies of nature, and the disregard or distortion of Marx’s ecology during the Soviet era and in the West.  

As an academic, I was at first skeptical about reading a comic version of Marx’s masterpiece, but Smith and Evans brilliantly manage to be both entertaining and enlightening, hilariously funny as well as dead serious. Even if you’re not familiar with any of the key concepts, you’ll get a lot out of the way they combine simple descriptions with the illustrations, and the updated edition really resonates with the financial crises we’ve experienced in the last couple of decades. 

This book, published in 2010, focuses on a much-neglected dimension of Marx’s work—his writings in defense of anti-colonial movements in Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere as well as his support for anti-racist movements in the U.S.

In contrast to claims that Marx was a class reductionist whose body of thought was incapable of accounting for issues of race and ethnicity, this work shows how he overcome many of the Eurocentric biases found in his earliest writings as he engaged in a systematic study of the non-Western world in the last decades of his life.

This a book that will change your view of what Marx was about from top to bottom.

Even though this book only comes out in 2023, and the high price tag means that most of us will only be able to access it from libraries, this monumental collection will be the landmark study of the global reception and translation of Marx’s great book. The parts I’ve seen or heard about are riveting, since they make us think about what it means to read and how reading can change minds as well as worlds. 

I’ve always had a weak spot for etchings and engravings.

My mother was a woodcut artist, and I suspect that in some prior life, parallel universe, or retirement plan, I am an etcher, even though certain of the techniques baffle me. The value of the medium is both aesthetic—to pronounce exactly—but also practical—to allow for copies.

Either way, and especially in the case of Doré, the effect is to cement the image, and in this way to do a kind of terrible thing, when you think about it: to rob Dante’s image from the reader’s imagination, to define what an angel looks like, or a storm, or the contours of heaven and hell.

So should we curse an artist like Doré, for having come between us and the poem, or do we thank him, for preserving it more indelibly than the words alone ever could?

First I want to say how much I love The Divine Comedy Dante’s Inferno and this graphic novel adaptation by Seymour Chwast is a wonderful version of the tale. If you don’t already know the story I highly suggest you read it in its original text but also be sure to grab this copy as it will really bring the levels of hell to a more comical light. I particularly love the black and white bold art style and humor brought to life here. 

After writing La Bella Lingua, I thought I had learned many of Florence’s hidden stories. Botticelli’s Secret proved me wrong. Although we‘ve never met, I think of Joseph Luzzi as a kindred soul who shares my passion for Italy's language, art, and literature. With a scholar’s depth and a writer’s deft touch, he re-creates the brilliance and complexity of the Renaissance and traces its impact through the centuries since. At the same time, Luzzi draws us into a layered mystery that crosses centuries and unfolds in ever richer, deeper dimensions. 

If you haven’t visited Florence, you’ll want to explore Botticelli’s and Dante’s hometown. If you have, you’ll want to return to deepen your appreciation of the city where artists and writers re-invented Western civilization.

Some of the most original scholarship on Dante in the past fifty or so years has been historical and contextual. This research enables us to understand Dante’s texts more fully in their own immediate contexts, of course, but it also reflects the fact that many readers of Dante become increasingly interested in the wider contexts – ethical, political, philosophical, theological, economic, literary, cultural, etc. – that Dante’s own poetic masterpiece opens up. In thirty chapters, the collaborative volume Dante in Context exemplifies the best of this historical and contextual work, and provides an invaluable introduction to the world of Dante.   

Just as Dante needed good guides on his epic journey through the afterlife, so contemporary readers typically need reliable companions on their own journeys into Dante’s poem. The best thing, I find, is to read Dante with, and alongside, his commentators. An ideal way to do this is through the invaluable online Dartmouth Dante Project and Dante Lab, which provide the entire texts of more than 75 of these commentaries in a customisable digital workspace. But if you want a book to hand, The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s ‘Commedia’ provides a really helpful overview of Dante’s masterpiece and its core narrative, linguistic, cultural, and doctrinal features, as well as useful introductions to the poem’s composition and reception. 

This book was a revelation to me in first studying Dante. Here was an author taking Dante’s questions, and his answers to those questions, seriously. A brilliant Cambridge Italianist and a Dominican priest, Kenelm Foster is passionately engaged with the theology of Dante.

In this book, he provides his celebrated account of the ‘Two Dantes,’ one overly committed to paganism, the other devoted to Christianity. He also develops his comparison between Aquinas’s theory of implicit faith (according to which pagans may be saved) and Dante’s strange invention of a section of limbo in which virtuous pagans are, it seems, eternally damned. Although I do not hold now to all of Foster’s provocative assumptions or conclusions, I still find his mode of questioning Dante, and reading Dante historically and theologically, inspirational and exhilarating.