tapestry of bronze
Here's a good way to begin a new year: with new editions of some superb books.
An author I'm proud to call a friend, Alice Underwood, has teamed with Victoria Grossack to produce a series of books called Tapestry of Bronze, that recast familiar and unfamiliar stories set in Bronze Age Greece in the form of novels. In so doing, they also yank the tropes of mythos into the tropes of the novel in ways that surprise and inform, deepen our understanding of a very foreign time, and, not least, delight the reader with just about every page.
One of their favorite tricks is what Viktor Schklovsky called ostranenie: "strangemaking." They'll plop you down in a scene and let you take in its unfamiliar combination of the barbaric and the civilized, and let you get hooked on whatever thing happens to be going on, and only a beat later allow you to realize that you are indeed in the middle of a familiar scene from myth or legend — the quiz of the Sphinx, Amphion building the walls of Thebes — and seeing it for the first time. After enough of this, you realize how conveniently we imagine ancient Greeks as people just like us only costumed. The truth is wilder and weirder, and far more interesting, and the result of seeing it is that we begin to see ourselves for the first time as well.
I especially enjoy the way the authors create such realistic nodes between the rational and the mythical: things that, one sees, can easily be explained by the natural language of a modern novel but are also easily explained by the supernatural language of the mythical mind. Lesser authors would simply use this trick to rob a story of its magic, or explain away some phenomenon; with Underwood and Grossack you feel again and again as if a black-and-white photo has been made into full color.
I'll also point out that when you buy these books, which are published by CreateSpace, you're helping affirm a new relationship between author and audience that suits our new century well, and points toward a solution for revitalizing all kinds of art in a way that finally makes economic sense for both author and audience.
One of the great pleasures of civilization is to sit down with a storyteller you know will absorb and satisfy. I can't wait.
Alice Underwood's Amazon page
tapestryofbronze.com
An author I'm proud to call a friend, Alice Underwood, has teamed with Victoria Grossack to produce a series of books called Tapestry of Bronze, that recast familiar and unfamiliar stories set in Bronze Age Greece in the form of novels. In so doing, they also yank the tropes of mythos into the tropes of the novel in ways that surprise and inform, deepen our understanding of a very foreign time, and, not least, delight the reader with just about every page.
One of their favorite tricks is what Viktor Schklovsky called ostranenie: "strangemaking." They'll plop you down in a scene and let you take in its unfamiliar combination of the barbaric and the civilized, and let you get hooked on whatever thing happens to be going on, and only a beat later allow you to realize that you are indeed in the middle of a familiar scene from myth or legend — the quiz of the Sphinx, Amphion building the walls of Thebes — and seeing it for the first time. After enough of this, you realize how conveniently we imagine ancient Greeks as people just like us only costumed. The truth is wilder and weirder, and far more interesting, and the result of seeing it is that we begin to see ourselves for the first time as well.
I especially enjoy the way the authors create such realistic nodes between the rational and the mythical: things that, one sees, can easily be explained by the natural language of a modern novel but are also easily explained by the supernatural language of the mythical mind. Lesser authors would simply use this trick to rob a story of its magic, or explain away some phenomenon; with Underwood and Grossack you feel again and again as if a black-and-white photo has been made into full color.
I'll also point out that when you buy these books, which are published by CreateSpace, you're helping affirm a new relationship between author and audience that suits our new century well, and points toward a solution for revitalizing all kinds of art in a way that finally makes economic sense for both author and audience.
One of the great pleasures of civilization is to sit down with a storyteller you know will absorb and satisfy. I can't wait.
Alice Underwood's Amazon page
tapestryofbronze.com
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