It's a new month... time for some new bug fixes!
While Matt is still working on harnessing the book data that we all have contributed to, and making it available for searches, he's also been rather busy fixing other things, and even adding some nifty little features. Read all about it in this Announcements forum post.
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony
Registered by QueenBoadicea of Brooklyn, New York USA on 9/25/2011
This book is in a Controlled Release!
This book is in a Controlled Release!
1 journaler for this copy...
Blurb taken from inside dust jacket cover:
Already an international literary event, and translated into a dozen languages, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” is a book without modern parallel—the most vivid recounting of the Greek myths and the loves, lives and struggles of gods, men, and women—since Robert Graves’ classic “The White Goddess”. Forming an active link in a chain that reaches back through Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” to Homer, Roberto Calasso’s reexploration of the fantastic fables explodes the entire world of Greek mythology, pieces it back together as it once must have been, and presents it to us in a new, astonishing, and utterly contemporary way.
“But how did it all begin?”
The eternal question that Man has always asked forms the opening words of this book. In answer, and in the voice of the born storyteller, Calasso leads us through the maze, back to the time when the gods were not yet born then forward again, all the way to the death of Odysseus, which marks the end of the age of heroes; and—most important of all—to the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, the last occasion when the gods sat down at a feast with mortal men. That day began a chain of calamities, a streak of blood that parted earth from Olympus forever. What was left—Cadmus’s parting gift to men—was the alphabet, and from it both history and poetry, and so our world, were born.
Yet the world of myth is not dead—it is present now as it was in the time of Homer. The most dangerous event since the beginning of time has been the gods’ discovery of us, their Olympian fascination with these human creatures that led them first to invade our world, then to assume human form for their own purposes and their own terrible games. The consequences of that fascination are the extraordinary encounters that we know as the myths—the great, hypnotic, erotic stories that Calasso walks us back into as if they are some vast, half-ruined palace we had forgotten we owned.
This book is in hardcover.
Already an international literary event, and translated into a dozen languages, “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony” is a book without modern parallel—the most vivid recounting of the Greek myths and the loves, lives and struggles of gods, men, and women—since Robert Graves’ classic “The White Goddess”. Forming an active link in a chain that reaches back through Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” to Homer, Roberto Calasso’s reexploration of the fantastic fables explodes the entire world of Greek mythology, pieces it back together as it once must have been, and presents it to us in a new, astonishing, and utterly contemporary way.
“But how did it all begin?”
The eternal question that Man has always asked forms the opening words of this book. In answer, and in the voice of the born storyteller, Calasso leads us through the maze, back to the time when the gods were not yet born then forward again, all the way to the death of Odysseus, which marks the end of the age of heroes; and—most important of all—to the marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, the last occasion when the gods sat down at a feast with mortal men. That day began a chain of calamities, a streak of blood that parted earth from Olympus forever. What was left—Cadmus’s parting gift to men—was the alphabet, and from it both history and poetry, and so our world, were born.
Yet the world of myth is not dead—it is present now as it was in the time of Homer. The most dangerous event since the beginning of time has been the gods’ discovery of us, their Olympian fascination with these human creatures that led them first to invade our world, then to assume human form for their own purposes and their own terrible games. The consequences of that fascination are the extraordinary encounters that we know as the myths—the great, hypnotic, erotic stories that Calasso walks us back into as if they are some vast, half-ruined palace we had forgotten we owned.
This book is in hardcover.
I released this yesterday in the Brooklyn Public Library, Central branch at the Great American Book Drive 2011.
