THUS BEGINS THIS TALE FROM THE MINOAN BRONZE AGE, an era as dim in record as it is radiant in myth, its soul arisen from the bedrock of ancient Krete, where palatial walls once gleamed with the splendor of Labrys-bearing kings and queens, and where legend has woven the names of Europa, Minos, the enchantress-sisters […]
Author’s Note of Asterios and the Labyrinth Read More »
A Tale of Paris and Paris: Echoes of Troy by Edmond Thornfield is set in fifteenth-century Cortona, where Lorenzo di Ranieri returns from Florence to a city under ecclesiastical scrutiny. Quiet warnings reach him that the Inquisition is preparing accusations meant to divide households and strip the town of power. Lorenzo uses his position in
A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy | Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers’ Favorite Read More »
In the vast pantheon of Greek mythology, sorcery is rarely a solitary gift. It runs in bloodlines, transmitted from divine parent to mortal child like the color of eyes or the timbre of a voice. No mythological family demonstrates this more powerfully than the daughters of Hēlios, the Sun God, and the Oceanid Perseis, for
Pasiphaë & Kírkē: Mighty Sorceresses of the Bronze Age Read More »
In the deepest places of the Greek mythological imagination—below Olympus, below the world of heroes and city-states and clever men with clever plans—there is a darkness that was never conquered. Zeus defeated the Titans and imprisoned them in Tartaros. He defeated the Giants and buried them beneath volcanoes. He defeated even Typhon, the last and
Echidna: Mother of All Monsters, Bride of the Mightiest Foe Read More »
S THE 21st CENTURY BEGINS, THE UNFOLDING LITERARY RENAISSANCE HAS SHATTERED THE SHACKLES OF HETERONORMATIVE commandments that have constrained the classic canon. Yet forces of erasure still confine our existence to the shadows. To this day, governments around the world, social prejudice, and insidious institutions stifle our voices with censorship, cruelty, and death. THIS IS
Reclaiming the Classical Tradition Read More »
A TALE OF PARIS & PARIS: ECHOES OF TROY IS AN ADULT HISTORICAL FANTASY NOVEL THAT DOES NOT MERELY DEPICT THE PAST—it speaks from within it. Set against a backdrop of religious persecution and societal repression, it explores the lives of opposite- and same-gender couples striving to love and survive in a world determined to
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On a clear summer night in the Northern Hemisphere, four constellations rise in sequence from the eastern horizon like old friends arriving at a long-awaited reunion. Gemini the Twins appears first, their bright stars Pollux and Castor burning side by side with the easy companionship of brothers. Cancer the Crab follows, small and subtle, easy
The Constellations of Atalanta: Myth, Astronomy, and the Night Sky of Ancient Greece Read More »
In the summer of 1952, a young English architect and philologist named Michael Ventris made one of the most extraordinary announcements in the history of scholarship. He had deciphered the writing on the clay tablets recovered from the ruins of Knossos, Mycenae, Pylos, and Tiryns—tablets inscribed with a script that had resisted decipherment for half
Speaking Bronze Age: Linear B and the Language of Mycenaean Greece Read More »
Every novelist has a private library of books that made their own work possible—not sources to be cited or influences to be acknowledged in an author’s note, but companions in the deeper sense: books that showed what historical fiction could do when it refused to compromise, when it trusted its readers with difficulty and moral
Six Novels to Read Before (or After) Atalanta of the Wild Read More »
There is a question I am asked, sooner or later, by nearly every reader who encounters my novels for the first time: Why the archaic English? The question is reasonable. We live in an age that prizes clarity, speed, and transparency of style. Modern prose aspires to invisibility—the words, ideally, should dissolve on the page,
Why I Write in Archaic English | Language as the Soul of Historical Fiction Read More »
