In the plain outside the walls of Troy, Agamemnon demands a fortress. With no materials except a few trees and unlimited sand, the Greeks dig a negative image of a palace into the white plain: a vast, inverted castle soaring into the depths of the earth.nnAfter ten years' journeying Odysseus returns, again and again, to Ithaca. Each time he finds something different: his patient wife Penelope has betrayed him and married; his arrival accelerates time and he watches his family age and die in front of him; he walks into an empty house in ruins; he returns but is so bored he sets sail again to repeat his voyage; he comes back to find Penelope is dead.nnMade up of forty-four retellings of passages from Homer's Odyssey, Zachary Mason's book is a fictional apocrypha: a radical and thrilling renovation of Classical legend. He uses Homer's linear narrative and explodes it: presenting fragments of alternative and contradictory re-takes and out-takes of the same familiar stories ' the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens ' breaking them up and putting them together into new shapes. Turned inside-out, these stories become glosses, mirrors and mazes that explore and examine Odysseus's journey: allowing us to see it afresh, in all its ambition, sadness and futility. Reminiscent of Borges or the Calvino of Invisible Cities, The Lost Books of the Odyssey is elegant, allusive, provocative and utterly fascinating ' and seems destined to become a modern classic.

About the Author
Zachary Mason is a computer scientist specialising in artificial intelligence. He was a finalist for the 2008 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. He lives in California.

Table of Contents
A subtle, inventive and moving meditation on the nature of story and what Louis MacNeice calls "the drunkenness of things being various".,Mason ungrounds the Odyssey, often gorgeously, turning Homer's twisting tale into a sermon on indeterminacy. He allows this grand myth of homecoming no beginning or end, just banks of fog, endless mirrors, Borgesian labyrinths'Mason delights in doubles, spirals, conceptual mazes and Moebius strips'he is a wondrous pleasure to read.,With one foot firmly planted in antiquity and one in the postmodern world, the book is an odd but well-balanced hybrid, the kind of work that's usually thrown off as a lark by an established writer toying with new forms, like Carlyle's Sartor Resartus or DeLillo's Valparaiso. All the more impressive that a debut author could create such a compelling curio.nn,Spellbinding. In his versions of these ancient myths Mason twists and jinks, renegotiating the journey to Ithaca with all the guile and trickery of Odysseus himself. Rarely is it so reassuring to be in the hands of such an unreliable narrator.,Dazzling ... an ingeniously Borgesian novel that's witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive. Mr. Mason has found a supple, lyrical voice in these pages that captures the spirit of the original Odyssey and at the same time feels freshly contemporary ... a stunning and hypnotic novel.

GeneralFeatures
ISBN13:	224090224
ISBN10:	9780224090223, 978-022409
Author1:	Zachary Mason
Publisher:	Random House Group
Binding:	Hardcover
Publishing Date:	40334
Number of Pages:	240
Language:	English
Dimension:	8.15 x 5.43 x 0.91 inches
Weight:	360 grams

There are no reviews for this product.