Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

By Katherine Rundell

Book Overview

Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Longlisted for the 2023 Plutarch Award

A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of 2022
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, and Literary Hub

From the 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.

He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, a member of Parliament--and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. 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 surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.

In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed act of evangelism, showing us the many sides of Donne's extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times--unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1250872502
• ISBN13: 9781250872500
• Release Date: September 2023
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Engaging and entertaining

Rundell has a wonderfully conversational and clear style of writing prose, and if you have any at all passing interest in John Donne or just Elizabethan England as a whole, this book is well worth grabbing.