The Trojan War Museum And Other Stories

A debut story collection of spectacular imaginative range and lyricism from a Pushcart Prize–winning author. In Ayse Papatya Bucak’s dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is “performed” at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And in the masterful title story, the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war. A joy and a provocation, Bucak’s stories confront the nature of historical memory with humor and humanity. Surreal and poignant, they examine the tension between myth and history, cultural categories and personal identity, performance and authenticity.

The Iliad is still the greatest poem about war that our culture has ever produced. For a hundred generations, poets and thinkers in the West have pored over, retold and argued about the events described in this martial epic, even when direct knowledge of it was lost. Various empires have admired it as a book that in telling the story of the siege of Troy also extols the warrior ethic, and teaches the young how to die well. Yet the figure at the heart of the epic, the consummate warrior Achilles, is a brooding, controversial hero. He is a fierce critic of those who have started this war and allowed it to drag on, consuming soldiers and civilians alike. Disconcertingly, The Iliad portrays war as a catastrophe that destroys cities, orphans children and wrecks whole societies. Caroline Alexander's extraordinary book is not about any of the traditional concerns that have occupied classicists for centuries. It is simpler and more radical than that. In her words, 'This book is about what the Iliad is about; this book is about what the Iliad says of war.'

A fantastic comic-book collaboration between the artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet Anne Carson, based on Euripides’s famous tragedy A NEW YORK TIMES BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2021 Here is a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, which follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).

Troy is familiar to us from the timeless and epic tales of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid. These have been retold over the centuries by writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Madeline Miller and Rick Riordan, and enacted by stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Brad Pitt. But how much do we really know about the city of Troy; its storytellers, myth, actual location or legacy? In this richly illustrated book, the story of Troy is told through a new lens. Published to accompany an exhibition at the British Museum, it introduces the storytellers and Classical artists inspired by the myths of Troy, then examines the tales themselves - from the Judgment of Paris to the return of Odysseus - through the Classical objects for which the museum is internationally known. The third section focuses on Heinrich Schliemann's excavations at Hissarlik, introducing the nineteenth-century search for the location of Troy that convinced the world that this city did once exist. Also explored is the possible Bronze Age background for the myth of the Trojan War, the historicity of which remains unresolved today. The final section delves into the legacy of Troy, and the different ways in which its story has been retold, both in literature and art, from Homer to the present day. Focusing on the major characters - Helen of Troy, Achilles and Hector, Aeneas and Odysseus - it illustrates how artists from Cranach and Rubens to Romare Bearden and Cy Twombly have been inspired by this archetypal tale to reflect on contemporary themes of war and heroism, love and beauty.

In this exquisite gem of a novel, David Malouf shines new light on Homer's Iliad, adding twists and reflections, as well as flashes of earthy humour, to surprise and enchant. Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking, Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all brilliantly recast for our times.

Drawing on archaeological research, an expert account of the famous historical battle confirms many details recounted in Homer's epic account, from Troy's alliance with the Hittite Empire to the significant fire at the end of the twelfth century and facts

What does it mean to be a hero? The ancient Greeks who gave us Achilles and Odysseus had a very different understanding of the term than we do today. Based on the legendary Harvard course that Gregory Nagy has taught for well over thirty years, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours explores the roots of Western civilization and offers a masterclass in classical Greek literature. We meet the epic heroes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but Nagy also considers the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the songs of Sappho and Pindar, and the dialogues of Plato. Herodotus once said that to read Homer was to be a civilized person. To discover Nagy’s Homer is to be twice civilized. “Fascinating, often ingenious... A valuable synthesis of research finessed over thirty years.” —Times Literary Supplement “Nagy exuberantly reminds his readers that heroes—mortal strivers against fate, against monsters, and...against death itself—form the heart of Greek literature... [He brings] in every variation on the Greek hero, from the wily Theseus to the brawny Hercules to the ‘monolithic’ Achilles to the valiantly conflicted Oedipus.” —Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly