The women of Troy find ways to shape their own destinies in a world dominated by men. Their motivations and resourcefulness will surprise you. See Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, and Andromache as they have their say.

Because we're blessed with the gift of not knowing the future, life isn't just what happens. It's enriched by the cloud of possibilities, what might happen, what we expect and hope for. This novel is a showing rather than a telling of the stories of Troy, restoring the immediacy of the moment as experienced by Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, Andromache, Leda, and Hecuba. Your familiarity with the traditional stories will prompt you to anticipate, only to be surprised by depths of personality and motivation, consistent with the original, but unexpected. And you'll savor the ironic differences between what you know as a reader and what the characters know. Rather than tediously proceed from one event to the next, you leap ahead from one dramatic moment to the next. The action takes place in dialogue and inner dialogue (thoughts in the making) rather than narration/exposition.

A fantastic comic-book collaboration between the artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet Anne Carson, based on Euripides’s famous tragedy A NEW YORK TIMES BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL OF 2021 Here is a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, which follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).

A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it—an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy and “one of contemporary literature’s most thoughtful and compelling writers" (The Washington Post). Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war—including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean. It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester. Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.

These stories, selected from three novels, show events of the Trojan War reflected through the minds of participants who are immersed in the immediacy of the moment. Because we're blessed with the gift of not knowing the future, life isn't just what happens. It's enriched by the cloud of possibilities, what might happen, what we expect and hope for. This novel is a showing rather than a telling of the stories of Troy, restoring the immediacy of the moment as experienced by Cassandra, Helen, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Polyxena, Andromache, and Hecuba. Your familiarity with the traditional stories will prompt you to anticipate, only to be surprised by depths of personality and motivation, consistent with the original, but unexpected. And you'll savor the ironic differences between what you know as a reader and what the characters know. Rather than tediously proceed from one event to the next, you leap ahead from one dramatic moment to the next. The action takes place in dialogue and inner dialogue (thoughts in the making) rather than narration/exposition. A standard synopsis/plot summary would miss the point of the book. The story unfolds as traditionally known, but the personalities and motivations of the main characters are often surprising. For example: Helen and Paris don't go to Troy and no one knows where they are until after the war has gone on for more than nine years. When she shows up, she had close-cropped hair and a jagged scar across her cheek (from an encounter with pirates. Achilles is a cross-dresser. He has a romance with Polyxena, daughter of the king of Troy, who has the look and the training of an Amazon and can out-wrestle her. Clytemnestra's handmaid is her lover Aegisthus in disguise. Her children are his, not her husband Agamemnon's.

24 stories plus self-contained excerpts from 9 novels, ranging from romance to mind-twisting fantasy to realism, to history. In addition to the title stories, these include: The Princess Tango, The Seventh Note, Reinventing the Airplane, The Gentle Inquisitor, Aunt Rachel and the Wizard of Oz, Saint Smith, The Place Where Time Stopped, Give Me Now My Nevermind, The Abandoned House on Rogers Avenue, Ethiopia Through Sonya's Eyes, Even Elephants Pray.

Raised in the Ukraine, Alexander Bulatovich (1870-1919) was a tsarist cavalry officer, an African explorer, and a religious leader. He guided an Ethiopian army through territory unknown even to them and fought in Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion. When he retired at age 33 to join a monastery, seven of his men followed him there. Later, he led a religious movement at Mount Athos, fought in WWI, and, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, was shot dead on his doorstep in the Ukraine. The odd shifts in his career, his qualities as a leader, and the puzzle of what motivated him first drew me to him. I was also drawn by the strangeness of the events — Russian exploration in Ethiopia, the Russian conquest of Manchuria, and a heresy battle in the twentieth century for which hundreds of monks were sent into exile. My historical sources included books by Bulatovich himself and over 25 hours of interviews with his sister, Princess Mary Orbeliani, when she was 99. The Name of Hero covers his life up through Manchuria. I will continue his story in two subsequent novels — The Name of Man and The Name of God.