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January 27, 2023
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Joseph Luzzi

Joseph Luzzi teaches at Bard and is the author of My Two Italies, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love.

Women in profile reading on the beach

The Great Summer Read

Why do we persist in this often futile literary quest?

by Joseph Luzzi | Monday, June 17, 2019
A Masterpiece Born of the Black Death

A Masterpiece Born of the Black Death

Boccaccio’s Decameron reminds us to live with gratitude

by Joseph Luzzi | Thursday, June 04, 2020
How to Read Dante in the 21st Century

How to Read Dante in the 21st Century

Breaking the code of “The Divine Comedy” with patient reverence

by Joseph Luzzi | Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Reassessing Rossellini placeholder image

Reassessing Rossellini

Restoration of Rome Open city, the director’s masterpiece, prompts a look at why he later retreated from the neorealism it introduced

by Joseph Luzzi | Wednesday, December 01, 2010

THIS WEEK’S ARCHIVE PICK

2nd Look

The Story of a Stare Down

by Penelope Rowlands

Hilary Mantel, one of Britain’s most revered novelists, died last year at the age of 70. She is beloved for her sweeping Wolf Hall trilogy, for which she won two Booker Prizes. But long before rehabilitating Thomas Cromwell’s reputation, Mantel was unparalleled in her crystalline dissections of power, whether between girls at the University of London or Dantonists in the French Revolution. In honor of Mantel’s enormous contributions to literature, dive back into her Tudor world with Penelope Rowlands’s essay about one of the key power dynamics Mantel explored: that between Cromwell and Sir Thomas More.

Smarty Pants Podcast

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