In a Dark Wood: A Memoir of Grief, Healing and the Mysteries of Love

Description

A story of love and grief. 'I became a widower and a father on the same day' says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante's 'The Divine Comedy' helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant daughter, and rediscover love. On a cold November morning, Joseph Luzzi, a Dante professor, found himself racing to hospital - his wife, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car accident. In one terrible instant, Luzzi became both a widower and a first-time father. Adrift and grieving, Luzzi found himself sharing Dante's dark wood with an intimacy that years of reading had never shown him: the words became a wise companion through the Inferno of his grief, his healing, and ultimately his rediscovered love.

Joseph Luzzi, age 46 and the first American born child in his Italian family, holds a doctorate from Yale and teaches at Bard. He is the author of 'My Two Italies' and 'Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy', which won the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association. An active critic, his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, and The Times Literary Supplement. Dante has been the focus of his teachingand writing for over twenty years, and he is a former Council Member of the Dante Society of America, founded in 1881 byDante's first American translator, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. www. JosephLuzzi.com @LuzziJoseph

''In a Dark Wood' charts Luzzi's journey through the hell of mourning and the purgatory of recovery, juxtaposing diapers and dating with demons and the damned ... there are many shrewd observations' Financial Times Praise for Joseph Luzzi: 'Touches, lightly and elegantly, on politics, history, geography, sociology, language, literature, film, food and family ... [There are] deeply felt stretches of memoir' New York Times Book Review 'A thoughtful book about exile, the sense of displacement and confusion that those driven from their roots carry with them forever' Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement