Translator Mary Jo Bang will read from her new version of Dante’s Paradiso, and Edward McPherson will read from his newest book, Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View.

Mary Jo Bang’s translation of Paradiso completes her groundbreaking new version of Dante’s masterpiece, begun with Inferno and continued with Purgatorio (maryjobang.com). New Yorker contributor Kevin Young calls her translation of Paradiso “uniquely here and now.”

Edward McPherson’s Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View is “an exploration of long-distance mapping, aerial photography, and top-down and far-ranging perspectives—from pre–Civil War America to our vexed modern times of drone warfare, hyper-surveillance at home and abroad, and quarantine and protest” (edwardmcpherson.net). It’s praised by Publisher’s Weekly as a “charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further” and by Kirkus Reviews as “A robust inquiry into ‘seeking the bigger picture’ . . . from the workings of aerial intelligence in modern spycraft to the AI targeting systems being used to bombard Gaza and the proliferation of drones.”

Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi, from Princeton University Press. She has a BA and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

Edward McPherson is the author of four books: Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat (Faber & Faber), The Backwash Squeeze and Other Improbable Feats (HarperCollins), The History of the Future: American Essays (Coffee House Press), and Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View (forthcoming from Astra House this October). He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, Tin House, the American Scholar, the Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Salon, Guernica, True Story, the Southern Review, Esopus, Epoch, Catapult, Essay Daily, Literary Hub, I.D., the New York Observer, and Talk, among others. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the PEN Southwest Book Award, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, an Artist Fellowship from the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and the Gesell Award from the University of Minnesota, where he received his MFA. He is a contributing editor of the Common Reader. He teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

P.S.–Because it’s Halloween, Mary Jo is offering a free copy of Paradiso to the best Dante or Beatrice costume, and will pass out Halloween candy!