The Iliad
by Homer
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Stephen Mitchell’s “very idiosyncratic” translation of Homer’s epic is “by far the most swift-footed in recent memory,” said Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker. Inspired by recent scholarship suggesting that an ur-version of the text preceded the longer version we know, Mitchell eliminates both minor hiccups in the poem and whole chapters. The result is a clean read, but his “insistence on speed” robs Homer’s verse of some of the nobility of its rhythms.
Why Read Moby-Dick?
by Nathaniel Philbrick
(Viking, $25)
The popular historian Nathaniel Philbrick is “bullish” about Moby-Dick, and he wants you to be, too, said Jim Higgins in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Philbrick fills his book with “short, lucid, intelligent chapters” that brim with infectious enthusiasm. Obviously, “this is not the type of guide a student uses to take apart a novel.” Philbrick is more “literary color analyst” than English professor, and he succeeds in building a reader’s excitement about tackling Melville’s whale of a novel.
The Shadow of a Great Rock
by Harold Bloom
(Yale, $28)
“The years have not slowed” Harold Bloom, said Philip Marchand in the Toronto National Post. In his ninth decade, and having worked his way through Shakespeare and much of the rest of the Western canon, the prolific critic has set about climbing what he calls “the sublime summit of literature in English”—the King James Bible. “In place of careful scholarship or theory Bloom substitutes a sheer blast of opinion and assertion,” and yet he’s as crankily interesting when exploring the Bible as he’s ever been.
Ed King
by David Guterson
(Knopf, $27)
“As the punning title suggests,” this comic novel from the author of Snow Falling on Cedars “wears its relationship to Oedipus Rex on its sleeve,” said Sam Leith in the Financial Times. Left on a Seattle doorstep as an infant, Ed King grows up to found a Google-like company. When he encounters his biological parents as strangers, he, of course, “hooks up” with his mom. Guterson’s plot-mapping bores, but he’s created a contemporary commentary on fate that’s both “prankish” and intriguing.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”