{"product_id":"the-good-new-a-tuscan-villa-shakespeare-and-death-hardcover","title":"The Good New: A Tuscan Villa, Shakespeare, and Death - Hardcover","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/reportcopyrightinfringement.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eReport copyright infringement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eJohn Glavin\u003c\/b\u003e (Author)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShakespeare wrote more plays about Italy than any other place in his own world. In this memoir, author John Glavin returns to Italy after decades away to teach Shakespeare's Italian plays to contemporary American students. As Glavin notes, \"There's Italy, and there's Shakespeare, and there's the Villa. The Villa gets you to a place where you can see yourself in a way that you couldn't if you didn't have Shakespeare as the optic.\" In the process they all come to understand themselves and their own lives in deep and revealing ways.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGlavin is trying to come to terms with his wife's recent battle with cancer, only to discover that one of his Italian relations has been kidnapped and murdered by the mafia. Suddenly the betrayals of \u003cem\u003eMerchant of Venice\u003c\/em\u003e and the murders of \u003cem\u003eOthello\u003c\/em\u003e are no longer matters of the past. At the same time his students, who only want a Shakespeare relevant to themselves, learn that they may gain more by making themselves relevant to Shakespeare.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWritten primarily as a first-person travel diary, \u003cem\u003eThe New Good\u003c\/em\u003e is divided into three roughly equal parts from September to November. The entries vary, but Mondays and Wednesdays always focus on the two class meetings. Mondays generally discuss the Shakespeare play under scrutiny. Wednesdays cover the students' usually comic but sometimes quite moving attempts to perform short scenes or speeches from that play. By no means limited to its academic background, \u003cem\u003eThe New Good\u003c\/em\u003e often travels beyond Fiesole, including the author's reluctant investigation-at his cousin's request-into her young son's suspicious \"suicide.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is a book for anyone who loves literature, or who loves Italy. But it is also a book for any reader who is alert to, and alarmed by, one of the pressing issues of our time. As a writer for \u003cem\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/em\u003e put it recently \"What's the point of college?\" Everywhere you turn, you see books that ask this question in academic and theoretical ways. They have titles like \u003cem\u003eIs College Worth It\u003c\/em\u003e or \u003cem\u003eCollege Unbound\u003c\/em\u003e, or \u003cem\u003eCollege: What It Was, Is, and Should Be\u003c\/em\u003e. There are even articles like Verlyn Klinkenborg's elegiac \"The Decline and Fall of the English Major.\" This book responds to that crisis and these questions, not with theory or data, but with experience. Through their Tuscan autumn the Villa students discover, and their often bewildered instructor re-discovers, the purpose of literature for English majors and everyone else who reads: to help us as individuals to recognize, tolerate and, where possible, relieve our species' troubling --and winning-- imperfections. No one who reads \u003cem\u003eThe New Good\u003c\/em\u003e will finish it with any lingering doubt whether College is indeed worth it.\u003c\/p\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 318\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0.88 x 9 x 6 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e January 02, 2018\u003c\/div\u003e\n            ","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47484864528637,"sku":"9780998643373","price":61.72,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/3414\/0157\/files\/Uk9IenVwYnpBTkxUaGY5ayttYldaZz09.webp?v=1777683152","url":"https:\/\/booktolia.com\/products\/the-good-new-a-tuscan-villa-shakespeare-and-death-hardcover","provider":"booktolia","version":"1.0","type":"link"}