“Delphi [by Clare Pollard] distills something elusive and upsetting about all the things we can’t quite see or understand about the present moment, even as all we ever do is look.” —Lynn Steger Strong, NYTBR “Covid-19 has arrived in London, and the entire world quickly succumbs to the surreal, chaotic mundanity of screens, isolation, and the disasters…
Category: Ancient/Mediterranean Contexts for Modern Tales
Greek Lessons, Han Kang
“In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her,…
Olympus, Texas, Stacey Swann
“A bighearted novel with technicolor characters, plenty of Texas swagger, and a powder keg of a plot in which marriages struggle, rivalries flare, and secrets explode, all with a clever wink toward classical mythology.” —Publisher’s blurb “The Briscoe family is once again the talk of their small town when March returns to East Texas two…
Antiquities, Cynthia Ozick
In Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick, “Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the…
Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr
“Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of recent times, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope, and a book. In the 15th century, an orphan named Anna lives inside the formidable walls of…
The Maidens, Alex Michaelides
“Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek Tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike—particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who…
Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories, Gwen E. Kirby
“Margaret Atwood meets Buffy in these funny, warm, and furious stories of women at their breaking points, from Hellenic times to today.” In Shit Cassandra Saw: by Gwen E. Kirby, “Cassandra may have seen the future, but it doesn’t mean she’s resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection, virgins escape…
Call Me Cassandra, Marcial Gala
“Set in Cuba and Angola during the 1970s and ’80s,” Marcial Gala’s Call me Cassandra “is narrated by one Raúl Iriarte. When he’s in preschool, Raúl decides that he is the reincarnation of Cassandra, the Trojan princess desired and then cursed by Apollo, who gave her the power to see the future but decreed that…
The Archeologist, Andreas Karkavitsas
“Translated into English for the first time” by Johanna Hanink, this work “is a landmark of Greek national literature, and an important document in the history of archeology and classicism…. More than a century ago, [Andreas] Karkavitsas’s The Archeologist (1904) helped to articulate and frame these kinds of questions. The work is an allegory of…
Miss Julia Series, Louisa Revell
Between 1949 and 1960, Louisa Revell worte several crime novels featuring a Latin teacher, Julia Tyler:The Bus Station Murders, No Pockets in Shrouds, A Silver Spade, The Kindest Use a Knife, The Men with Three Eyes, See Rome and Die, A Party for the Shooting. Here’s what goodreads.com has to say about A Silver Spade:…