'A countryman cleaves earth with his crooked plough. Such is the labour of his life. So he sustains his native land ...' Virgil's affectionate poem of the land does not admit brief excerpts, any more than the labour of the farmer can easily be shortened. His verse, descriptive and narrative, brings us the disappointments as well as the rewards of the countryman's year-round devotion to his crops, his vines and olives, livestock great and small, and the complex society of b...

'A countryman cleaves earth with his crooked plough. Such is the labour of his life. So he sustains his native land ...' Virgil's affectionate poem of the land does not admit brief excerpts, any more than the labour of the farmer can easily be shortened. His verse, descriptive and narrative, brings us the disappointments as well as the rewards of the countryman's year-round devotion to his crops, his vines and olives, livestock great and small, and the complex society of b...

James Frazer’s monumental study of world mythology and folklore has been a controversial work for over a century. The Golden Bough is “a great body of primitive and barbarous beliefs" and essential reading for anyone interested in mythology, supernatural magic or religion, especially modern neo-pagan beliefs. More than one critic has said that it should be required reading for everyone.“To read [The Golden Bough] is to share in the adventure of ma...

"A transporting novel told in the voice of a girl Virgil left in the margins. It is an absorbing, reverent, magnificent story.” —Cleveland Plain DealerNational Book Award–winning literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin reimagines Virgil's epic poem The Aeneid through the eyes and voice of Lavinia, Aeneas' last wife.In The Aeneid, Vergil’s hero fights to claim the king’s daughter, Lavinia, with whom he i...

Comprising the ancient texts of The Belgariad and The Malloreon, The Rivan Codex is a book which stands in the same relationship to the Belgariad and Malloreon as The Silmarillion does to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.Before David Eddings started to write his first fantasy series, the BELGARIAD, in the late 1970s, he spent a year working on the design and mythology of the fantasy world in which it is set.The Rivan Codex comprises the immensely readable background mat...

‘Finally I realised that I had been practising for this job every time I wrote a quatrain . . . I had spent all this time – the greater part of a lifetime – preparing my instruments.’The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James’s vivid translation – his life’s work and decades in the making – presents Dante’s entire epic poem in a single song.While many poets and translators have attempted to capture the full gl...

"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." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesA New York Times BestsellerA New York Times Notable Book of the YearZachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling de...

"A version that has been long awaited, and likely to become the new standard."—Washington PostOvid's epic poem—whose theme of change has resonated throughout the ages—is one of the most important texts of Western imagination, an inspiration from Dante's times to the present day, when writers such as Salman Rushdie and Italo Calvino have found a living source in Ovid's work. Charles Martin combines a close fidelity to Ovid's text with verse that catches the speed and liveli...

Written towards the end of the second century AD, The Golden Ass tells the story of the many adventures of a young man whose fascination with witchcraft leads him to be transformed into a donkey. The bewitched Lucius passes from owner to owner - encountering a desperate gang of robbers and being forced to perform lewd 'human' tricks on stage - until the Goddess Isis finally breaks the spell and Lucius is initiated into her cult. Apuleius' enchanting story has inspired generations of writer...

Aeneas flees the ashes of Troy to found the city of Rome and change forever the course of the Western world--as literature as well. Virgil's Aeneid is as eternal as Rome itself, a sweeping epic of arms and heroism--the searching portrait of a man caught between love and duty, human feeling and the force of fate--that has influenced writers for over 2,000 years. Filled with drama, passion, and the universal pathos that only a masterpiece can express. The Aeneid is a book f...

When Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun's ground-breaking anthology After Ovid (also Faber) was published in 1995, Hughes's three contributions to the collective effort were nominated by most critics as outstanding. He had shown that rare translator's gift for providing not just an accurate account of the original, but one so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poetwere somehow the same person. Tales from Ovid, which ...

The modern, unacademic idiom of A.D. Melville's translation opens the way to a fresh understanding of Ovid's unique and elusive vision of reality.