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Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HELL

Scott G. Bruce

This is three thousand years of visions of hell, from the ancient Near East to modern America.
From the Hebrew Bible's shadowy realm of Sheol to twenty-first-century visions of Hell on earth, THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HELL takes us through three thousand years of eternal damnation. Along the way, you'll take a ferry ride with Aeneas to Hades, across the river Acheron. You'll meet the Devil as imagined by a twelfth-century Irish monk--a monster with a thousand giant hands, and then wander the nine circles of Hell in Dante's Inferno, in which gluttons, liars, heretics, murderers, and hypocrites are made to endure crime-appropriate torture. You'll also witness the debates that raged in Victorian England when new scientific advances cast doubt on the idea of an eternal hereafter. Drawing upon religious poetry, epics, theological treatises, stories of miracles, and accounts of saints' lives, this fascinating volume of hellscapes illuminates how Hell has long haunted us, in both life and death.


Scott G. Bruce (editor) is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Undead and the author of three books about the abbey of Cluny. He is a professor of history and the director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He worked his way through college as a gravedigger.
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Published 2018-09-04 by Penguin Classics

Book

Published 2018-09-04 by Penguin Classics

Comments

Marilyn Manson responds to being included on list of songs used by US interrogators. Read more...

Now that I know what Hell is like, I shall take more pains to avoid it. This is an amazing collection.

What Does Hell Look Like? Read more...

The book was featured in a "new and noteworthy" round up in the New York Times Book Review: ...For when everyday life has got you down, dip into over three thousand years' worth of depictions of a fiery, tortuous afterlife of eternal punishment. From the Bible through Dante and up to Treblinka and Guantánamo Bay, here is a rich source for nightmares... Read more...

This fascinating collection kept me reading long after midnight, and the images it put in my head kept me up even longer. A deeply engaging read. Read more...

Scott G. Bruce's original essay featuring THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HELL ran online yesterday in the Wall Street Journal and will be featured in print this weekend. Read more...

You will be [frightened] by The Penguin Book of Hell, in which writers from antiquity to the 20th century describe the eternal, infernal hereafter. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Read more...

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF HELL appeared as an excerpt in LitHub Read more...

Greek: Alexandria ; Russian: Alpina