A Song for the Underworld


Book Description

Long ago, when gods and heroes walked the earth in triumph and tragedy, true love and epic deeds were set among the stars... In the ancient land of Greece, at a time when kings warred and the people suffered, the Fates fixed their timeless eyes upon the son of a muse, and his story inspired hope and beauty in a ravaged world. Raised by the daughters of Zeus in the shadow of Mount Olympus, Orpheus is filled with a love of the world, of creation, and of song. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he inspires mortals, birds, beasts, and even the Gods with his music. He is blessed with a humility and unmatched skill that make him the greatest musician of the age. However, when the god Apollo tells Orpheus that he has more to learn, the young man leaves the safety of his home to wander the world in search of his destiny. Having travelled alone into the vast northern forests of Thrace, Orpheus discovers that elusive gift granted to few mortals or gods: True Love. In the love and friendship of the nymph, Eurydice, Orpheus comes to understand one of the greatest mysteries of the world. He is inspired in all things, and his music reaches unimagined heights of beauty. But the Fates can be cruel, the world barbarous, and the greatest gifts given, including love, can be taken away. When Eurydice’s light is suddenly extinguished from Orpheus’ life, the musician must make a choice. He can live a life without his only love and let the world tear itself to pieces, or he can make a journey that would terrify even the bravest of heroes to rescue his love and bring her back into the light. Will Orpheus be able to cross the dark plains of the Underworld and bring Eurydice back? Or will he lose his soul, and his love, for daring to challenge the Fates? The only way he can succeed is to plumb the depths of his deepest emotions and play like he has never played before... A Song for the Underworld is an epic retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from Greek mythology. It is the third book in the Mythologia fantasy series by best-selling and award-winning author and historian, Adam Alexander Haviaras. If you enjoy books by Madeline Miller, Stephen Fry, Natalie Haynes or Jennifer Saint then you will love the Mythologia series. Read A Song for the Underworld today and experience the greatest love story of the ancient world!




Orpheus


Book Description




Eurydice


Book Description

“Eurydice is a luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth from his beloved wife’s point of view. Watching it, we enter a singular, surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream—an anxiety dream of love and loss—where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious… Ruhl’s theatrical voice is reticent and daring, accurate and outlandish.” —John Lahr, New Yorker A reimagining of the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice journeys to the underworld, where she reunites with her beloved father and struggles to recover lost memories of her husband and the world she left behind.




The Orphic Hymns


Book Description

The best-selling English translation of the mysterious and cosmic Greek poetry known as the Orphic Hymns. At the very beginnings of the Archaic Age, the great singer Orpheus taught a new religion that centered around the immortality of the human soul and its journey after death. He felt that achieving purity by avoiding meat and refraining from committing harm further promoted the pursuit of a peaceful life. Elements of the worship of Dionysus, such as shape-shifting and ritualistic ecstasy, were fused with Orphic beliefs to produce a powerful and illuminating new religion that found expression in the mystery cults. Practitioners of this new religion composed a great body of poetry, much of which is translated in The Orphic Hymns. The hymns presented in this book were anonymously composed somewhere in Asia Minor, most likely in the middle of the third century AD. At this turbulent time, the Hellenic past was fighting for its survival, while the new Christian faith was spreading everywhere. The Orphic Hymns thus reflect a pious spirituality in the form of traditional literary conventions. The hymns themselves are devoted to specific divinities as well as to cosmic elements. Prefaced with offerings, strings of epithets invoke the various attributes of the divinity and prayers ask for peace and health to the initiate. Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow have produced an accurate and elegant translation accompanied by rich commentary.




Oliver Tree Vs Little Ricky ALIEN BOYS


Book Description

Death-defying scooter stunts, Ukrainian tanks, sharks, monster trucks… these are just some of the indignities facing Oliver Tree as he is thrown into the meat grinder of the music industry to promote his debut retirement album "Ugly is Beautiful". Denied his chosen herbal medicine to overcome the aches and pains, Oliver threatens to retire, prompting his label to find an out-of-this world replacement in Little Ricky, an alien with a sick mix tape….and Oliver is forced to reckon with his own mortality in an epic battle that threatens to destroy them both.




Feasting and Fasting in Opera


Book Description

Convivial beginnings. The symposium and the birth of opera ; The Renaissance banquet as multimedia art ; Orpheus at the cardinal's table ; Eating at the opera house -- "Tastes funny" : tragic and comic meals from Monteverdi to Mozart ; Comedy as embodiment in Monteverdi and Mozart ; The insatiable : tyrants and libertines ; Indulging in comic opera : gastronomy as identity -- The effects of feasting and fasting ; Coffee and chocolate from Bach to Puccini ; Verdi and the laws of gastromusicology ; The Callas diet.




Hades, Argentina


Book Description

VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD FINALIST CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLIST “A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” —Seattle Times A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love. In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both? It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.




Border States in the Work of Tom Mac Intyre


Book Description

This work analyses the prose and drama of the Irish writer Tom Mac Intyre and the concept of paleo-postmodernism. It examines how Mac Intyre balances traditional themes with experimentation, which in the Irish literary canon is unusual. This book argues that Mac Intyre’s position in the Irish literary canon is an idiosyncratic one in that he combines two contrary aspects of Irish literature: between what Beckett terms as the Yeatsian ‘antiquarians’ who valorize the ‘Victorian Gael’ and the ‘others’ whose aesthetic involves a European-influenced ‘breakdown of the object’ which is associated with Beckett. Mac Intyre’s experimentation involves a breakdown of the object in order to uncover an unconscious Irish mythological and linguistic space in language. His approach to language experimentation is Yeatsian and this is what the author terms as paleo-postmodern. Thus the project considers how Mac Intyre incorporates Yeatsian revivalism with postmodern deconstruction in his drama and short stories.




The Matter of the Page


Book Description

Ancient and medieval literary texts often call attention to their existence as physical objects. Shane Butler helps us to understand why. Arguing that writing has always been as much a material struggle as an intellectual one, The Matter of the Page offers timely lessons for the digital age about how creativity works and why literature moves us. Butler begins with some considerations about the materiality of the literary text, both as a process (the draft) and a product (the book), and he traces the curious history of “the page” from scroll to manuscript codex to printed book and beyond. He then offers a series of unforgettable portraits of authors at work: Thucydides struggling to describe his own diseased body; Vergil ready to burn an epic poem he could not finish; Lucretius wrestling with words even as he fights the madness that will drive him to suicide; Cicero mesmerized by the thought of erasing his entire career; Seneca plumbing the depths of the soul in the wax of his tablets; and Dhuoda, who sees the book she writes as a door, a tunnel, a womb. Butler reveals how the work of writing transformed each of these authors into his or her own first reader, and he explains what this metamorphosis teaches us about how we too should read. All Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English and technical matters are carefully explained for general readers, with scholarly details in the notes.




Neon Gods


Book Description

Society darling Persephone Dimitriou wants nothing to do with her mother's ambitions. She's biding her time until she's able to leave the ultra-modern city of Olympus and start her doctorate degree. The one thing she never planned on? Her mother ambushing her with an engagement to Zeus--a man with more than a few dead wives in his past. Persephone will do anything to escape that fate...even flee the sparkling upper city and make a devil's bargain with a man she once believed was a myth. Hades has spent his life in the shadows, and he has no intention of stepping into the light. Not even for the woman who flees into his territory as if the very hounds of hell are on her heels. But when he finds that Persephone can offer a little slice of the revenge he's spent his entire life craving? It's all the excuse he needs to agree to help her--for a price. She'll be his for the summer, and then he'll see her safely out of Olympus and away from her mother and Zeus. Hades and Persephone's deal might seem simple enough, but they both quickly realize it's anything but. With every breathless night spent with Hades, Persephone wonders at her ability to leave him behind. And Hades? Now that he has a taste for Persephone, he's willing to go to war with Olympus itself to keep her...