If you have ever read a novel set in the ancient world and found yourself wondering how much of it is true—how the author knew what a Mycenaean palace smelled like, or how a Minoan priestess dressed, or what Linear B actually says—then you have already crossed the threshold from reader into something more. You […]
Five Works of Classical Scholarship Every Historical Fiction Reader Should Know 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 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
Author’s Note of A Tale of Paris & Paris: Echoes of Troy 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 »
INTRODUCTION Atalanta of the Wild began not with a plot outline or a character sketch, but with a question that Ovid refused to answer. In the Metamorphoses, the transformation of Atalanta and Hippomenes into lions occupies a handful of lines—a swift, almost casual punishment appended to the story of the golden apples. I could not
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