Galatea

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of The Song of Achilles and Circe, an enchanting short story that boldly reimagines the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion. **Featuring a new afterword by Madeline Miller** In Ancient Greece, a skilled marble sculptor has been blessed by a goddess who has given his masterpiece – the most beautiful woman the town has ever seen – the gift of life. Now his wife, he expects Galatea to please him, to be obedience and humility personified. But she has desires of her own, and yearns for independence. In a desperate bid by her obsessive husband to keep her under control, she is locked away under the constant supervision of doctors and nurses. But with a daughter to rescue, she is determined to break free, whatever the cost... _________________________ Praise for CIRCE 'A thrilling tour de force of imagination' Mail on Sunday 'A bold and subversive retelling' New York Times 'A novel to be gobbled greedily in one sitting' Observer 'A remarkable achievement' Sunday Times

"Dazzling...a cerebral thriller that's both intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling, a lively tour de force."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times After four novels and several years living abroad, the fictional protagonist of Galatea 2.2—Richard Powers—returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually more worldly, until it demands to know its own name, sex, race, and reason for existing.

A down-on-his-luck boxing trainer finds a woman worth fighting for in this “assured” novel by an MWA Grand Master Award winner (Kirkus Reviews). It took some doing, but Duke Webster is out of prison. Val Valenty arranged the parole, and now the onetime prizefighter and boxing coach is his puppet, breaking his back on Valenty’s farm in exchange for a pittance. But Valenty is about to find out that boxing men never take orders without a scrap. The trouble begins when Webster meets Valenty’s wife. A barrel-shaped woman whose extreme weight makes her old before her time, Holly stays fat on Valenty’s cooking—meat, potatoes, and endless gravy. Webster puts her on a diet, slimming her down the way he would train an over-the-hill pro in search of a comeback. But as her waistline shrinks and her beauty emerges, Valenty gets jealous—putting them on course for a bloody confrontation where only the hungry will survive. This gritty, surprising tale comes from the acclaimed author of Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce—a writer with “an empathy for losers and society’s lost souls” (Quad-City Times). Praise for James M. Cain’s fiction “Cain is one novelist who has something to teach just about any writer, and delight just about any reader.” —Anne Rice, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Interview with a Vampire “Entertaining and cleverly plotted.” —The New York Times

This title was published in 2001. Pygmalion and Galatea presents an account of the development of the Pygmalion story from its origins in early Greek myth until the twentieth century. It focuses on the use of the story in nineteenth-century British literature, exploring gender issues, the nature of artistic creativity and the morality of Greek art.

Perhaps you have heard the story of a sculptor who in a statue created the perfect woman, of how he fell into desperate love with this statue, of how he prayed to Goddess Aphrodite, of how She granted flesh to the statue, of how in a warm, passionate kiss the statue awakened to life: this, the story of aesthetic love is here retold in verse, beautifully, lustily, "Galatea: The Statue Comes to Life".

"Midas (1590) uses mythology in quite a different way, dramatising two stories about King Midas (the golden touch and the ass's ears) in such a way as to fashion a satire of King Philip of Spain (and of any tyrant like him) for colossal greediness and folly. In the wake of the defeat of Philip's Armada fleet and its attempted invasion of England in 1588, this satire was calculated to win the approval of Queen Elizabeth and her court."--BOOK JACKET.

The Pygmalion myth, most famously told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, has always fascinated artists. This fascination, due to the erotic potential of the story, resulted in an abundance of patriarchal re-narrations from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century. With the turn of the 20th century, however, the Pygmalion stories gradually changed under the influence of feminist thought and emancipation. The woman created by Pygmalion no longer remained a passive creature but began to resist her master and his male fantasies, sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes in open rebellion. The study at hand focuses on the development of the tale in the Anglo-Saxon literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. The author will analyze some of these modern Pygmalion versions, written by George Bernard Shaw, Carol Ann Duffy and Neil LaBute amongst other significant author