The Virtual Memories Show is a weekly podcast featuring interviews by Gil Roth. In Episode 111 of Virtual Memories, scholar and writer Prue Shaw discusses her book, Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity.

“We talk about our favorite parts of the Dante’s Commedia, the poem’s transformation for her over the decades, Dante’s challenge of expressing the inexpressible (especially in Paradiso), the fate of Jews in Dante’s afterworld, and the reasons why we all — poets and non-poets, believers and non-believers — should be reading Dante. [. . .]

We also talk about readers’ reticence toward starting the Commedia, why the Paradiso is the most difficult of the three books, the strange role of Ulysses in the poem, Dante’s ‘mercy rule,’ why she chose the structure and themes for Reading Dante, the perfect epigraph to her book, which she discovered too late for inclusion, and why I need to get to the Uffizi!”    —The Virtual Memories Show

Listen to the podcast here.