Penelope was the TALK OF THE TOWN! She was causing A LOT of commotion with ALL her little friends AND parents. In fact, she was the cause of a neighborhood UPROAR! But why?

As Penelope slowly drifted off to sleep and began to dream, she felt what she thought was a cool breeze floating across her cheek. Opening one eye, Penelope discovered that a gentle wind was swirling around. Then, all at once the sound of a great big WHOOSH came from somewhere in her room!

It was SPRING, and Penelope decided she wanted more than ANYTHING, to have a birdhouse to call her own.

The biggest event in Pebnelope's life was the day her parents sat her down at the kitchen table and told her she would finally be getting her wish to become a GROWN-UP!

It was Sunday, May 11th, and Penelope couldn't wait to wake up. It was going to be a FANTABULOUS DAY. It was her HALF BIRTHDAY AND MOTHER'S DAY all rolled into one!

“A book about war that, like The Naked and the Dead or Catch-22, manages to be about very much more” (Brian Morton, author of Starting Out in the Evening). Odysseus is returning to Ithaca after nearly twenty years—half of it spent as a soldier and the other half as a soldier of fortune. During his absence, his wife, Penelope, has remained faithful, despite Odysseus being missing and presumed dead. But when her husband suddenly reappears, he confronts those who have been trying to seduce his wife and kills them all. Based on Homer’s ancient epics, this is a novel about war and peace—and about how returning soldiers can find peace more horrible than war and home more hellish than the battlefield. “The narrative of the novel drives along fast, and Odysseus’s adventures on his long journey home are vividly presented. Readers already familiar with them are unlikely to be disappointed; many who come to them fresh will be enthralled.” —The Scotsman “Startlingly original.” —The Times

This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses both to the Odyssey and to the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ - memoir, poetry, children's literature, rap, novels - testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer's afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer's footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of not only classics, but also translation studies, comparative literature, and women's writing will find much to interest them, while the volume's concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman's voice.