Recommendations from our site
“I really love the Penelopiad. It’s wonderful at bringing out some of what I already hinted was important in my work of a translator: teasing out the multiple perspectives, multiple voices, in this poem. I also love how it juxtaposes different styles and different voices. It has both ballad-like verse and prose intermixed, which is not what the Odyssey does, but I think it speaks to something which is in the Odyssey, about the mixture of different modes, different ways of seeing things.” Read more...
Emily Wilson, Classicist
This novella by Canadian author Margaret Atwood was published in 2005 as part of a first set of books in Canongate’s ‘Myth’ series. Written from the perspective of Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, we see the heroine’s tireless efforts to maintain order whilst her husband is away fighting at Troy—bringing up her wayward son Telemachus singlehandedly whilst fighting off hundreds of bloodthirsty suitors who seek to dethrone Odysseus and take Penelope for a wife. Nominated for the 2006 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, we see the dark side of the Odyssey and the suffering of the women at its heart.
From our article Books like The Song of Achilles
