Author · 4 titles

Homer

Homer gave the ancient world — and ours — its greatest stories of war and homecoming. In the Iliad, a quarrel among warriors opens into a meditation on mortality, friendship, and the pity of battle. In the Odyssey, a king fights his way back to Ithaca and to a household waiting under siege. The poems move with oral music: catalogues and formulas, sudden similes, and scenes of startling intimacy amid grandeur. For more than two thousand years they have taught poets how to begin, how to digress, and how to make gods and mortals share one stage. Few books still feel so old and so urgently alive.

All contributors