The Dante Club: A Novel - Softcover

"Ingenious . . . [Matthew Pearl] keeps this mystery sparkling with erudition."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"Not just a page-turner but a beguiling look at the U.S. in an era when elites shaped the course of learning and publishing. With this story of the Dante Club's own descent into hell, Mr. Pearl's book will delight the Dante novice and expert alike."--The Wall Street Journal

"[Pearl] ably meshes the . . . literary analysis with a suspenseful plot and in the process humanizes the historical figures. . . . A divine mystery."--People (Page-turner of the Week)

"An erudite and entertaining account of Dante's violent entrance into the American canon."--Los Angeles Times

"A hell of a first novel . . . The Dante Club delivers in spades. . . . Pearl has crafted a work that maintains interest and drips with nineteenth-century atmospherics."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Pearl's ingenious notion is to set his début novel in Boston in 1865, when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were translating Dante into English."--The New Yorker

"A most ingenious and beautifully written mystery--one that reminds us that siphoning meaning from chaos is also the métier of the detective."--Commonweal

"Audacious and captivating . . . Pearl's Dante scholarship is truly admirable, and hats off to anyone who's this passionate about the crazy Florentine--or, indeed, to anyone who's this passionate about anything. . . . Don't be surprised if, after having read The Dante Club, you find yourself revisiting your old tattered college-issued Inferno."--Esquire

"A thriller with resonance. Pearl has achieved that intoxicating blend of reality and imagination that Doctorow gave us . . . with Ragtime."--The Orlando Sentinel

"Delightful and suspenseful, an unexpected story about Boston's literary giants tracking a post-Civil War serial killer . . . a unique, ambitious, entertaining read, a historical thriller with a poetic streak."--Baltimore Sun

"There aren't many writers around who can remind you of both James Patterson and Umberto Eco."--San Jose Mercury News

"Like the great Italian poet himself, Pearl also shows a flair for suspenseful plotting and gruesome descriptions. . . . Pearl masterfully synthesizes countless aspects of mid-nineteenth-century life into a riveting mystery that creeps through all corners of crippled postwar Boston."--Time Out New York

"A hellacious romp of a novel."--The Plain Dealer

"The author achieves the right richness of detail, illuminating but never getting in the way of the story."--The Denver Post

In 1865, the preparations of the Dante Club--whose members include Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes--to release the first translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy are threatened by a series of murders that re-create episodes from the Inferno. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.