This series includes 12 books.
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Book 0Dream Angus
The Celtic God of Dreams
by Alexander McCall Smith
“Elegant . . . Spare, polished . . . Smith fluidly weaves in contemporary vignettes.” — Publishers Weekly The latest addition to the Myths series from Canongate, now available in paperback, is a beguiling tale from the beloved author of the best-selling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency . Angus is one of the earliest Celtic deities and one of the most cherished to this day. Like an even more handsome combination of Apollo and Eros, he is the god of love, youth, and beauty. Just the sight of him has made people fall in love, and he has the power to reveal a person’s true love in a dream, if asked politely. Alexander McCall Smith has turned his renowned storytelling talents to crafting irresistible stories from this ancient myth. Five exquisite contemporary fables of love lost and found unfold alongside Angus’s search for the beautiful Caer, the swan maiden he met in his dreams. McCall Smith unites reality and dreams, today and the ancient past, mesmerizingly, leaving the reader to wonder: what is life but the pursuit of dreams?
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Book 0Girl Meets Boy (Canongate Myths)
by Ali Smith
Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's re-mix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, Girl meets boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world.
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Book 0Binu and the Great Wall (Canongate Myths)
by Tong Su
In Peach village, crying is forbidden. But as a child, Binu never learnt to hide her tears. Shunned by the villagers, she faced a bleak future, until she met Qiliang, an orphan who offered her his hand in marriage.Then one day Qiliang disappears. Binu learns that he has been transported hundreds of miles and forced to labour on a project of terrifying ambition and scale - the building of the Great Wall.Binu is determined to find and save her husband. Inspired by her love, she sets out on an extraordinary journey towards Great Swallow mountain, with only a blind frog for company. What follows is an unforgettable story of passion, hardship and magical adventure.
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Book 0Where Three Roads Meet (Canongate Myths)
by Salley Vickers
At the end of his life, an old man waits in his office for a stranger to arrive. Over the next few weeks, Teiresias will visit again, making his way across the heath to relate the story of his life. As these two men sit together in front of a roaring fire, a remarkable tale unfolds.The compelling story of Oedipus, who, unknowingly, kills his father and marries his mother, is probably the most influential of all the Greek myths, having furnished Freud's theory of psychoanalysis. Bestselling novelist Salley Vickers, herself a former psychoanalyst, takes the ancient story of patricide and incest and explores it through the vision of Teiresias, the blind seer, who alone 'sees' the truth about the protagonists' terrible past and their place in the cosmic order. Salley Vickers says, "I am interested in what human beings believe they know and in fact don't know, which for me is the true tragedy of Oedipus. It is an utterly contemporary drama about the ways we blind ourselves to reality and the price we pay for knowledge."
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Book 0Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (Myths)
by Dubravka Ugresic
Baba Yaga is an old hag who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. She is one of the most pervasive and powerful creatures in all mythology. But what does she have to do with a writer's journey to Bulgaria in 2007 on behalf of her mother? Or with a trio of old women who decide to spend a week together at a hotel spa? Startlingly original, "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" takes a traditional myth and spins it afresh. The result is an extraordinary meditation on femininity, ageing, identity, secrets, storytelling and love.
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Book 0Weight
The Myth of Atlas and Heracles
by Jeanette Winterson
"When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is ‘I want to tell the story again.’ My work is full of cover versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Heracles takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom, too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere." -- from Jeanette Winterson’s Foreword to Weight
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Book 0Lion's Honey
by David Grossman
Israel's most lauded contemporary writer retells the myth of Samson, one of the most tempestuous, charismatic, and colorful characters in the Hebrew Bible. There are few other Bible stories with so much drama and action, narrative fireworks and raw emotion, as we find in the tale of Samson: the battle with the lion; the three hundred burning foxes; the women he bedded and the one woman that he loved; his betrayal by all the women in his life, from his mother to Delilah; and, in the end, his murderous suicide, when he brought the house down on himself and three thousand Philistines. "Yet, beyond the wild impulsiveness, the chaos, the din, we can make out a life story that is, at bottom, the tortured journey of a single, lonely and turbulent soul who never found, anywhere, a true home in the world, whose very body was a harsh place of exile. For me, this discovery, this recognition, is the point at which the myth — for all its grand images, its larger-than-life adventures — slips silently into the day-to-day existence of each of us, into our most private moments, our buried secrets." — from David Grossman's introduction to Lion's Honey.
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Book 0A Short History of Myth (Myths, The)
by Karen Armstrong
“Human beings have always been mythmakers.” So begins best-selling writer Karen Armstrong’s concise yet compelling investigation into myth: what it is, how it has evolved, and why we still so desperately need it. She takes us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters right up to the “Great Western Transformation” of the last five hundred years and the discrediting of myth by science. The history of myth is the history of humanity, our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, which link us to our ancestors and each other. Heralding a major series of retellings of international myths by authors from around the world, Armstrong’s characteristically insightful and eloquent book serves as a brilliant and thought-provoking introduction to myth in the broadest sense—and explains why if we dismiss it, we do so at our peril.
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Book 0Penelopiad, The: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (The Myths)
by Margaret Atwood
"Homer’s Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than the Odyssey , especially for the details of Penelope’s parentage, her early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumors circulating about her. I’ve chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The maids form a chanting and singing Chorus, which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of the Odyssey : What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in the Odyssey doesn’t hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids and, in The Penelopiad , so is Penelope herself." -- from Margaret Atwood’s Foreword to The Penelopiad
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Book 0The Fire Gospel
by Michel Faber
Theo Griepenkerl, a Canadian linguistics scholar, is sent to Iraq in search of artifacts that have survived the destruction and looting of the war. While visiting a museum in Mosul, he finds nine papyrus scrolls tucked in the belly of a bas-relief sculpture: they have been perfectly preserved for more than two thousand years. After smuggling them out of Iraq and translating them from Aramaic, Theo realizes the extent of his career-making find, for he is in possession of the Fifth Gospel, and it offers a shocking and incomparable eyewitness account of Christ’s crucifixion and last days on Earth. Nakedly ambitious and recently dumped by his girlfriend, Theo sets out to share his discovery with the world in the form of a headline-grabbing U.S. book tour. Caught in the throes of his newfound fame, Theo fails to consider the global and cultural ramifications his discovery will have with God-fearing folks and religious zealots worldwide. Like Prometheus’s gift of fire, Theo’s book has incendiary consequences. A hugely entertaining, and by turns shocking story, The Fire Gospel is a smart, stylish, and suspenseful novel by the celebrated author of The New York Times best seller The Crimson Petal and the White .
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Book 0Helmet of Horror, The: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur (The Myths)
by Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield
Victor Pelevin, the wildly interesting contemporary Russian novelist who The New Yorker named one of the Best European Writers Under 35, upends any conventional notions of what mythology must be with his unique take on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. By creating a mesmerizing world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide, The Helmet of Horror is a radical retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur set in an Internet chat room. They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms that open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered a dialogue they cannot escape — a discourse defined and destroyed by the Helmet of Horror. Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown. The Helmet of Horror is structured according to the way we communicate in the twenty-first century — using the Internet — yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents this myth for an age where information is abundant but knowledge ultimately unattainable.
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Book 0The Hurricane Party (Myths)
by Klas Ostergren
Hanck Orn's son is dead. When they come to the door they tell him it was a heart attack, but he knows they are lying. So he travels to the outermost reaches of the land to find out what really happened. When he lands on the island he is met by a young woman, hair streaked with blood, raving like a lunatic. She is one of the sisters, who tell him the story of how his son died in the great hall of the Clan, the Norse gods, who were holding a party. But the festivities soon got out of hand, the guests began to argue with one another, and the mischievous shapeshifter Loki dealt a deadly blow.
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