Life Is Art: New Memoir

Michael Paterniti is a journalist, an essayist, and the bestselling author of Driving Mr. Albert and The Telling Room, named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, and The Christian Science Monitor. Nominated for the National Magazine Award eight times, he is also the recipient of an NEA grant and two MacDowell Fellowships. His writing has been described as “humane, devastating, and beautiful” by Elizabeth Gilbert, “spellbinding” by Anthony Doerr, and “expansive and joyful” by George Saunders. In the seventeen wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying (The Dial Press)—Longlisted for a 2015 National Book Award in Nonfiction—he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015

Joseph Luzzi holds a doctorate from Yale and teaches at Bard. He is the author of My Two Italies, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy, which won the Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the Modern Language Association. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum, and the Times Literary Supplement. In his latest book, In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (Harper Wave), Luzzi finds the answer to the question, “Where do we turn when we lose everything?” in Dante’s The Divine Comedy. When Luzzi’s pregnant wife was in a car accident—and died forty-five minutes after giving birth to their daughter, Isabel—he finds himself a widower and first-time father at the same moment. While he grieves and cares for his infant daughter, he turns to Dante’s Divine Comedy for solace. Luzzi’s book is a hybrid of heart-rending memoir and critical insight into one of the greatest pieces of literature in all of history. In a Dark Wood draws us into man’s descent into hell and back.