Synopses & Reviews
Garry Wills's complete translation of Saint Augustine's spiritual masterpiece — available now for the first time.
Garry Wills is an exceptionally gifted translator and one of our best writers on religion today. His bestselling translations of individual chapters of Saint Augustine's Confessions have received widespread and glowing reviews. Now for the first time, Wills's translation of the entire work is being published as a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. Removed by time and place but not by spiritual relevance, Augustine's Confessions continues to influence contemporary religion, language, and thought. Reading with fresh, keen eyes, Wills brings his superb gifts of analysis and insight to this ambitious translation of the entire book.
Review
"[Wills] renders Augustine’s famous and influential text in direct language with all the spirited wordplay and poetic strength intact." Los Angeles Times
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"[Wills’s] translations...are meant to bring Augustine straight into our own minds; and they succeed. Well-known passages, over which my eyes have often gazed, spring to life again from Wills’s pages." Peter Brown, The New York Review of Books
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"Augustine flourishes in Wills’s hand." James Wood
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"A masterful synthesis of classical philosophy and scriptural erudition." Chicago Tribune
Synopsis
Garry Wills is an exceptionally gifted translator and one of our best writers on religion today. His bestselling translations of individual chapters of Saint Augustine s
Confessions have received widespread and glowing reviews. Now for the first time, Wills s translation of the entire work is being published as a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. Removed by time and place but not by spiritual relevance, Augustine s
Confessions continues to influence contemporary religion, language, and thought. Reading with fresh, keen eyes, Wills brings his superb gifts of analysis and insight to this ambitious translation of the entire book.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.
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About the Author
Saint Augustine was born on November 13th, A.D. 354, in Tagaste (modern Souk Ahras, Algeria), and died almost seventy-six years later in Hippo Regius (modern Annaba) on the Mediterranean coast sixty miles away. In the years between, he devoted himself to the mastery of the texts of scripture, becoming a formidable theologian.
Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine’s Childhood, Saint Augustine’s Memory, and Saint Augustine’s Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include “Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.