Super-Infinite
“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
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize
A New Yorker Best Books of the Year Pick
An AudioFile Best Audiobook of the Year
Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize
A Literary Hub Pick of Most Anticipated Upcoming Books
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.
Praise