I. Introduction The religion of the Late Bronze Age Aegean was not Olympian religion in an earlier form. It was something older and stranger: more local, more animistic, more deeply rooted in the agricultural rhythms of the land and the intimate realities of the household. The defined personalities we know from Homer, of gods with […]
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A Tale of Paris and Paris: Echoes of Troy, in the Chronicles of Cortona by Edmond Thornfield, follows Lorenzo di Ranieri, a militia sergeant in Cortona, when inquisitors from Perugia arrive to pursue charges of heresy. Lorenzo forms a backstairs circle with Matteo at the Ranieri stable and relies on Costanza Briani to care for
Do you miss stories that feel alive, where the world breathes, where every word has been chosen by a human hand that hesitated, reconsidered, and chose again? Have you grown weary of fiction that tells instead of shows, of worlds that feel thin and formulaic, assembled rather than imagined? In an era when AI-generated content
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There are readers, and there are novelist-readers. The two experiences are not the same. A reader surrenders to the story; a novelist-reader surrenders and watches himself surrendering, noting every mechanism that eases or impedes the fall. I cannot pick up another author’s book without half my mind standing apart, pencil in hand—not exactly to judge,
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A stylized, black-and-white vector image of the Minoan horns of consecration is the logo of ETHORN Publishing, the imprint under which I publish my historical fiction. It is also used in a more elaborate form as the topmost illustration of the colophon pages of my novels. The symbol has been part of my literary vision
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I confess that as a child I believed the following tales were the stories of real people who had lived long ago. Only when I got older did I understand their significance as myths, though at times I am not entirely sure. The details seem too specific, too human, too particular to be pure invention.
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This is a fascinating question precisely because it touches the murky frontier between Mycenaean religion, Arcadian local cults, and the Olympian mythology that the Greeks of the Archaic and later periods projected backward into the Bronze Age. The short answer is that Athána Alēa is not an Olympian Athena at all. She appears to preserve
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Every few months I set aside the novelist’s desk and return to the reader’s chair. These are six books I return to, recommend without hesitation, or simply cannot stop thinking about. They span centuries, continents, and registers—Gothic Louisiana, medieval Cornwall, the towers of Notre-Dame, Revolutionary France, the streets of Salvador da Bahia—but they share the
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I must be careful here. Say too much, and I spoil the particular pleasure of meeting Lino Briani for the first time in A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy. But I may confess a few things about where he came from and why I chose to put him in the novel at
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The question of point of view is the first serious decision a novelist makes, and it shapes everything that follows—the texture of the prose, the range of the story, the emotional distance between reader and character. Writers have many options: first-person, second-person, omniscient third, limited third, close third, or some combination of these. For my
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