Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature and the Gods is the culmination of Roberto Calasso s lifelong study of the gods in the human imagination. By uncovering the divine whisper that lies behind the best poetry and prose from across the centuries, Calasso gives us a renewed sense of the mystery and enchantment of great literature.
From the banishment of the classical divinities during the Age of Reason to their emancipation by the Romantics and their place in the literature of our own time, the history of the gods can also be read as a ciphered and splendid history...

-A giddy invasion of stories--brilliant, enigmatic, troubling, outrageous, erotic, beautiful.- --The New York Times Book Review
-So brilliant that you can't look at it anymore--and you can't look at anything else. . . . No one will read it without reward.-
--The Boston Globe
With the same narrative fecundity and imaginative sympathy he brought to his acclaimed retelling of the Greek myths, Roberto Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts,...

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony comes one of the most significant books in recent years on a writer of perennial interest-a virtuoso interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka.

What are Kafka's fictions about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Countless answers have been offered, but the essential mystery remains intact. Setting out on his own exploration, Roberto Calasso enters the flow, the tortuous movement, the physiology of Kafka's work to discover why K. and Josef K.-the protagonists of The Castle and The...