SuperInfinite, Katherine Rundell
SuperInfinite, Katherine Rundell
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Super-Infinite
The Transformations of John Donne

Author: Katherine Rundell

Narrator: Simon Vance

Unabridged: 7 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/06/2022

Synopsis

From standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death.Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing.In his myriad lives he was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, an MP—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. Along the way he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from black surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love.

About Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of acclaimed books for children, including the multiaward-winning Impossible Creatures. Her books for adult readers include Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures and Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction. She was the 2024 recipient of the British Book Award for Author of the Year. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London and is currently a Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

About Simon Vance

Simon Vance is an award-winning actor and an AudioFile Golden Voice with over fifty Earphones Awards and thirteen prestigious Audie Awards. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Krista on June 08, 2022

He loved to coin formations with the super-prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying, super-universal, super-miraculous. It was part of his bid to invent a language that would reach beyond language, because infinite wasn’t enough: both in heaven, but also here and now on earth, Do......more

Goodreads review by Daisy on August 12, 2023

Donne would have done well in today’s society. He was a man who was not adverse to self promotion, a net-worker and social climber who makes the Middleton sisters look shy and retiring. He took pains to look fashionable in a way that looked as though he had taken no pain at all and, most pertinently......more

Goodreads review by Christina on September 13, 2024

Sobbed my way through the final chapters. Extraordinary. Review to come when I recover. UPDATE: I keep thinking I’ll be able to write a cogent and helpful review of this book. And then I still can’t. I’m having trouble putting my finger on exactly why I found this odd little biography so very affecti......more

Goodreads review by Lauren on October 23, 2022

I absolutely adored this. Katherine's writing is always utterly magic, and her thoughts on Donne + his relationship with creativity were so fascinating. At first I really revolted against the idea of poetry as a disposable and evolving form of currency, that has value for what it can give you social......more

Goodreads review by Fred on May 07, 2024

Donne is not a writer with whom I am super familiar. He popped up in college English courses here and there; mostly I know what is in the Norton Anthology and The New Oxford Book of English Verse (the one edited by Helen Gardner, not Q or Ricks). I have a very slender chapbook of Donne that my wife......more

Quotes

“Narrator Simon Vance is, as always, eloquent, precise, and finely attuned. He delivers some of the finest lines in British poetry with ease and assurance…Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.” AudioFile

“This superb book rises to the challenge of introducing Donne and his world to a new generation.” New York Times Book Review

“[A] dizzyingly fun biography of a poet who lived headlong…[and] a rollicking snapshot of Elizabethan England.” Chicago Tribune

“[Rundell] ransacks his poetry and prose for insight into the man himself…As a guide to how John Donne’s mind worked, Super-Infinite is a wonder.” Wall Street Journal

“It’s the best book on Donne in years.” Washington Examiner

“Rundell is a playful, incandescent stylist who brings scintillating insight to her subject.” Washington Independent Review of Books

“[Rundell] writes with both the knowledge of an expert and the friendly passion of a proselytizer.” New Yorker

“Captures Donne in all his guises as well as the historical period in which he lived…Written with verve and panache.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Brings the poet, his poetry, his many lives, and his turbulent Elizabethan and Stuarts times vividly to life.” Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times bestselling author

“A wonderful, joyous piece of work…It is fantastic to have this most elusive and mysterious of men brought out into the light, for all to see.” Maggie O’Farrell, New York Times bestselling author

Awards

  • New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
  • AudioFile Earphones Award
  • Baillie Gifford Prize
  • New Yorker Best Books of the Year
  • AudioFile Best Audiobook of the Year
  • Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize
  • Literary Hub Pick
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