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Alcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial traitor, infamous for his dizzying changes of loyalty in the Peloponnesian War. Nemesis tells the story of this extraordinary life and the turbulent world that Alcibiades set out to conquer. David Stuttard recreates ancient Athens at the height of its glory as he follows Alcibiades from childhood to political power. Outraged by Alcibiades’ celebrity lifestyle, his enemies sought every chance to undermine him. Eventually, facing a capital charge of impiety, Alcibiades escaped to the enemy, Sparta. There he traded military intelligence for safety until, suspected of seducing a Spartan queen, he was forced to flee again—this time to Greece’s long-term foes, the Persians. Miraculously, though, he engineered a recall to Athens as Supreme Commander, but—suffering a reversal—he took flight to Thrace, where he lived as a warlord. At last in Anatolia, tracked by his enemies, he died naked and alone in a hail of arrows. As he follows Alcibiades’ journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades’ adventures against a backdrop of cultural splendor and international chaos. Navigating often contradictory evidence, Nemesis provides a coherent and spellbinding account of a life that has gripped historians, storytellers, and artists for more than two thousand years.
WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2012 Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles's mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, Achilles must go to war in distant Troy and fulfill his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus goes with him, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.
After the Trojan war, a Myrmidon is washed upon strange shores, and he learns that he must learn his destiny in order to become more than an ant-sized shadow in the insurmountable shadow of history. "No demigod dreads death. But being mortal, a Myrmidon walks in the shadow of a demigod in order to make peace with death, the rushing dark of it, the unabated truth of the blackness ultimate. Achilles is dead. The Myrmidons have all fallen apart from me, the recipient of fate's undeserved succor. They emerged from the ants on Zeus' sacred oak. Zeus made them vast and innumerable as the ants on the oak. Ants became men and populated Aegina. But now they are nearly without number. Myrmidon, the Thessalian King, is our great ancestor. I feel that I am Aiacos, Achilles' grandfather, who found himself living on an island alone. Zeus gave him comfort by turning ants into people and thereby allowing Aiacos to have company. The Myrmidons were the first to build ships with sails, but now history recedes with a mere, wistful blink. I stand here on the verge of pure, static zero. No thoughts nor memories can I marshal. The ten-year siege of Troy has yielded an afterimage: the blood-rimmed bowl of the ocean being chased by a blankness too beautiful to be called oblivion. History has already marched ahead. And I, an Ant man among the dead shadows of other Ant men, drown in its unparalleled shade. A Myrmidon is an Ant man as he fights with a vast contingent of men. He is never supposed to follow without a lead. He is a man fighting with other men when death breathes the multiplied breath of the enemy. For mortals on a battlefield, death arrives sooner than imminence. Foolishness outlasts fear. I was astounded by my own survival. I stand here alone and undead on a pristine beach. The wind whispers. I trudge along the shore in the hoping of catching an echo in that whisper. I imagine Achilles rising to the throne abdicated by an Agamemnon unfit to rule. An Agamemnon driven mad by the voices of the gods. Achilles sits on the throne and motions for me to come forward. The distance between us no longer seems godlike. I, foolish mortal that I am, once again yield to a foolishness that outlasts fear. Achilles drinks from a bejeweled cup. He drinks from his own mortality. But mortality swallows him before he can swallow it. Then everything dissolves, and I see the past recede. I find myself vainly pursuing destiny's stolen bride. No, it is not Helen. It is a world displaced from its shore. I must regain my purpose and rush past the all-encircling gloom. The Trojan Aeneas escaped with other Trojans before the Greeks besieged the city of Troy. I must find Aeneas. But something else awaits than a fugitive Trojan. I need to find what remains of a world that still beats inside me."
Back in print for the first time in decades, Auden’s National Book Award–winning poetry collection, in a critical edition that introduces it to a new generation of readers The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden’s most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry. In addition to its famous title poem, which reimagines Achilles’s shield for the modern age, when war and heroism have changed beyond recognition, the book also includes two sequences—“Bucolics” and “Horae Canonicae”—that Auden believed to be among his most significant work. Featuring an authoritative text and an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs, this volume brings Auden’s collection back into print for the first time in decades and offers the only critical edition of the work. As Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden’s collection “is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.” Describing the book’s formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why The Shield of Achilles should be seen as one of Auden’s most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.
U.S. military intelligence analyst Bill Lane is on the trail of a Romeo-class Russian sub. The sub was supposed to be harmlessly scuttled at a submarine graveyard, and the mastermind behind its theft, an ex-KGB agent named Valeri Yernin, was supposed to be dead. But Bill Lane will have to prepare himself for one more surprise when he finally tracks down his target--because his opponent will be devastatingly ready for him. "Top-flight adventure writer Flannery brings back U.S. military intelligence analyst Bill Lane and his lover, British agent Frannie Shipley, this time hot on the trail of an old Russian submarine, which is said to have been sunk with all hands but has in fact been sold to unfriendly powers. " - Publishers Weekly At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Details the author's reconstruction of the shield of Achilles, using Homer as her guide in the creative process.
A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations. The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.
This powerful, passionate, and beautifully crafted retelling of the epic tale of Achilles re-creates Homer's fated hero in a new and striking reality. Born of the Sea nymph Thetis by the mortal King Peleus, and hidden as a girl until Odysseus discovers him, Achilles becomes the Greeks' greatest warrior at Troy. Into his story comes a cast of fascinating characters—among them, Hector, Helen, Penthiseleia the Amazon Queen, and the centaur Chiron; and finally John Keats, whose writings form the basis of a meditation on the nature of identity and shared experience. An unforgettable and deeply moving work of fiction, Achilles is also an affirmation of the story's enduring power to reach across centuries and cultures to the core of our imagination.
Keturah, renowned for her storytelling, follows a legendary hart deep into the forest, where she becomes hopelessly lost. Her strength diminishes until, finally, she realizes that death is near—and learns then that death is a young lord, melancholy and stern. She is able to charm Lord Death with a story and gain a reprieve, but he grants her only a day, and within that day she must find true love. A mesmerizing love story, interweaving elements of classic fantasy and high romance.
The War is over, won by Ender Wiggin and his team of brilliant child-warriors. The enemy is destroyed, the human race is saved. Ender himself refuses to return to the planet, but his crew has gone home to their families, scattered across the globe. The battle school is no more. But with the external threat gone, the Earth has become a battlefield once more. The children of the Battle School are more than heroes; they are potential weapons that can bring power to the countries that control them. One by one, all of Ender's Dragon Army are kidnapped. Only Bean escapes; and he turns for help to Ender's brother Peter. Peter Wiggin, Ender's older brother, has already been manipulating the politics of Earth from behind the scenes. With Bean's help, he will eventually rule the world. Shadow of the Hegemon is the second novel in Orson Scott Card's Shadow Series. THE ENDER UNIVERSE Ender series Ender’s Game / Ender in Exile / Speaker for the Dead / Xenocide / Children of the Mind Ender’s Shadow series Ender’s Shadow / Shadow of the Hegemon / Shadow Puppets / Shadow of the Giant / Shadows in Flight Children of the Fleet The First Formic War (with Aaron Johnston) Earth Unaware / Earth Afire / Earth Awakens The Second Formic War (with Aaron Johnston) The Swarm /The Hive Ender novellas A War of Gifts /First Meetings At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.