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.
Q&A with Daniel Tam-Claiborne
Tickets with “& Book” include a copy of Katabasis. In-person ticket holders will pick their book up at the venue the night of their event; streaming ticket holders will have a copy of the book shipped to their door by Mam’s Books. There will be a personalization line after the event where each attendee may have one book personalized: see below for details.
Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.
That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.
Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….
Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.
With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.
But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom.
Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received support from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Kundiman, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His debut novel, Transplants, was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and is forthcoming from Regalo Press (Simon & Schuster) in 2025.
Please note: Immediately following the presentation, the personalization line will begin. To help things run smoothly and efficiently, we kindly ask attendees to put away their phones as they approach the signing table—photos are only permitted from further back in line, not near the front. Once at the front, all bags and personal items should be dropped at the designated bag drop table. The only item in hand should be the one book being personalized by Rebecca, clearly labeled with a post-it. And just a friendly reminder: absolutely no phones or photos at the signing table. If you have an item you’d like Rebecca to receive, please hand it to an event staffer—they’ll make sure she gets it after the event. Thanks so much for helping us keep the experience enjoyable and seamless for everyone. We’re thrilled to have you with us and hope you’re having a fantastic time!
