“Issue #19: Dante’s Inferno,” NonBinary Review (2019)

“If you’re a writer with a Facebook account, you’ve seen the meme that says ‘Be nice to me or I’ll put you in my novel.’

“Literary revenge is as old as writing. As far back as 121AD, Suetonius was dishing political dirt with his book The Twelve Caesars, which chronicled the lives of twelve Roman emperors from Julius Caesar through Domitian in the kind of gossipy detail that feels more like the Enquirer than your average high school history text.

“While modern readers have long enjoyed the imaginative meting out of punishment, the difficulty inherent in reading The Inferno is the amount of homework one has to do to get through all the personal vendettas Dante scores against those who had wronged him. But as readers, and as writers, we forgive Dante, because he was the first to truly give us permission to use our art to revenge ourselves on our own enemies.”    —Lise Quintana, Zoetic Press

Check out the entire issue dedicated to Dante’s Inferno here.