Until the Sun Breaks Down: A Künstlerroman in Three Parts

Written when the author was in his early and mid-twenties, Until the Sun Breaks Down is a contemporary American Kunstlerroman modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy. In three parts and one hundred chapters that mirror Dante's classic poem, Nicolello takes the reader through present-day American towns and cities: infernal, purgatorial, and paradisal aspects with nothing left off the table. At once a book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Dante as the chronicle of William Fellows, child of a poverty-stricken single mother and precocious student dreaming of something better than what society offers, the book will serve as a guide to untold disconsolate Westerners who are wondering what has happened to American literature; where Catholic voices might emerge from, and how; and a bulwark against militant atheism by immersing the subject head-on and elucidating how to remove one's self from technological desolation and recapture the essence of the Logos Incarnate, or the love that moves the sun and other stars.