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Super-Infinite
- Author
- Katherine Rundell
- Narrator
- Simon Vance
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Publish Date
- 6 September 2022
- Run Time
- 7 hours 4 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
What to expect
From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.
Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.
In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.
Critics Review
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“Narrator Simon Vance is, as always, eloquent, precise, and finely attuned. He delivers some of the finest lines in British poetry with ease and assurance…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
AudioFile
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“This superb book rises to the challenge of introducing Donne and his world to a new generation.”
New York Times Book Review
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“[A] dizzyingly fun biography of a poet who lived headlong…[and] a rollicking snapshot of Elizabethan England.”
Chicago Tribune
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“[Rundell] ransacks his poetry and prose for insight into the man himself…As a guide to how John Donne’s mind worked, Super-Infinite is a wonder.”
Wall Street Journal
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“It’s the best book on Donne in years.”
Washington Examiner
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“Rundell is a playful, incandescent stylist who brings scintillating insight to her subject.”
Washington Independent Review of Books
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“[Rundell] writes with both the knowledge of an expert and the friendly passion of a proselytizer.”
New Yorker
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“Captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived…Written with verve and panache.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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“Brings the poet, his poetry, his many lives, and his turbulent Elizabethan and Stuarts times vividly to life.”
Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times bestselling author
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“A wonderful, joyous piece of work…It is fantastic to have this most elusive and mysterious of men brought out into the light, for all to see.”
Maggie O’Farrell, New York Times bestselling author
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“The result is worthy of its subject—every page sparkles.”
Claire Tomalin, author of The Young H. G. Wells
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“Rundell makes Donne come alive as a remarkable and extraordinary and almost boundless human being.”
Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author
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“Companionable, astute, intimate in tone and clear-eyed in judgment, it brings Donne and his milieu to glorious life.”
Nick Laird, author of Feel Free
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Katherine Rundell
- Narrator
- Simon Vance
- Duration
- 7 hours 4 minutes
- Release Date
- 6 September 2022
- ISBN
- 9798212030816
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Blackstone Publishing
- Genre
- Biography: writers, Literary studies: poetry and poets, Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600
Synopsis
From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.
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