Vintage Sin: "Inferno", "Sabbath's Theater"

Description

"Vintage Sin" is a limited edition gift pack which consists of beautifully designed separate volumes of "Inferno" by Dante and Philip Roth's shocking novel, "Sabbath's Theater." "Vintage Sin" is just one of ten "Vintage Classic Twins" to collect. Each twin consists of two books: a specially designed limited edition of one modern classic title and one established classic work. The books in each pair have been carefully selected to provide a thought-provoking combination. "Inferno": On Good Friday evening in the year 1300, Dante finds himself lost in a dark and menacing wood. The ghost of Virgil offers to lead him to safety but the path lies through the terrifying kingdom of Satan. On his journey deep into the underworld, Dante crosses paths with both old acquaintances and famous characters from history as he witnesses the strange and gruesome sufferings of the damned. "Sabbath's Theater": Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Micky Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress, Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265. When he was nine years old he met Bice Portinari, the Beatrice who inspires both his first work, La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy. Beatrice died in 1290. He had at least three children with his wife Gemma di Manetto Donati. His involvement in politics in Florence led to his exile in 1302 and he eventually settled in Ravenna where he died in 1321. Steve Ellis, Professor in English at the University of Birmingham, was born and brought up in York, and studied in Florence as part of his doctorate for London University. His frustration as a student with existing translations of Dante spurred a long-lasting desire to translate it himself. His critical works include Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T.S. Eliot and a study of Eliot's Four Quartets.A major Gregory Award winner, he has also published two books of poetry, Home and Away and West Pathway. In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years 'for the entire work of the recipient'.