R. F. Kuang, Katabasis (2025)

“R.F. Kuang’s much-anticipated fantasy follows Peter and Alice as they undergo a titular ‘katabasis‘ ( trans. literally from Ancient Greek as a ‘going down’ or ‘descent’ often within the literary context of a descent to the Underworld). The two are academic ‘magicians’ struggling in graduate school, and due to their need for solid letters of recommendation for the academic job market, they decide to journey to Hell in order to bring back their committee chair from the dead. Throughout the novel, Kuang makes reference to Dante as both poet and pilgrim: she references Dante and lists him amongst the figures who are considered to have historically made a successful journey to hell: Aeneas, Orpheus, Lucian, Seneca, and Saint Brendan. Kuang also refers to the life of Dante, as well as specific episodes and concepts of Inferno: Dante’s correspondence with Bernardo Canaccio, contrapasso, the poets and philosophers of Limbo, the city of Dis, and others. The structure of Kuang’s own hell reflects Dante’s, although her underworld is composed of Eight Courts as opposed to Nine Circles. This novel stands as a literary inheritor of Dante’s Commedia, restructuring Hell from the perspective of a contemporary academic at Cambridge, and makes frequent and integral references to him both as an author and as an imagined literary sojourner to Hell.”    —Contributor Stephen Fodroczi

From the publisher’s website: “Dante’s Inferno meets Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul—perhaps at the cost of their own.”    —Harper Collins

Contributed by Stephen Fodroczi (Cornell University ’26), with thanks to our other Dante Today contributors who also sent the listing our way!