A New Sublime: Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics

Description

Boitani's presentation of the classics is as entertaining and unexpected as it is informative. He invites the reader to discover the timeless beauty and wisdom of ancient literature, highlighting its profound and surprising connections to the present. With their emphasis on the mutability and fluidity of identity and matter, their examination of the power and position of women in society, and their enduring treatments of force and subjugation, fate and free will, the ethical life, hospitality, love, compassion, and mysticism, the classics play active roles in our lives and can help us refine our opinions and our values. Ranging from Homer to Tacitus, with Thucydides, Aristotle Sophocles, Cicero, and many others in between, Boitani's A New Sublime is a fresh, inspiring reminder of the enduring importance and beauty of the classics of the Western canon.

Piero Boitani is one of Italy's most renowned philologists and literary critics. An expert on ancient myths, medievalist, and Dante scholar, he is currently Professor of Comparative Literature at the Sapienza University in Rome. Ann Goldstein has translated into English all of Elena Ferrante's books, including each of the New York Times bestselling installments in Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, the fourth of which, The Story of the Lost Child, was shortlisted for the MAN Booker International Prize. She has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. She lives in New York.

Praise for A New Sublime "Piero Boitani's A New Sublime: Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics teach us an additional one, the most important: that the classics are alive within us." --Il Foglio "A New Sublime is as bewitching and entertaining as a novel. [ . . . ] Boitani uncovers the unexpected, extraordinary modernity of the classics." --Piero Dorfles, Per un pugno di libri "A remarkable book. [ . . .] The stories collected by Boitani, written centuries ago, still speak to us." --Corrado Augias, Repubblica TV