RANDY BOYAGODA

“Super Dads,” p. 50

“In its ambition and achievement, Dante’s Divine Comedy is unmatched by almost any literary work. I’ve been reading a canto a day for the past three years, and the poem keeps revealing itself and the world in new ways. My story is set in an amusement park in small-town America, which evokes so much that’s wholesome and earnest. But that same place is now a hangout for people addicted to opioids, trudging in all-buteternal circles. To make sense of that tragedy, I go to Dante.”

Randy Boyagoda is a writer and a professor at the University of Toronto. He is working on his next novel, Dante’s Indiana.