Edmond Thornfield’s Atalanta of the Wild follows Atalanta, an Arkadian huntress raised in the mountain wilds, after the father who abandoned her returns seeking forgiveness. Lord Iásios invites her into the royal house of Tegea, where she meets siblings she once believed she would never know. Her bow has made her at home in the […]
Atalanta of the Wild | Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers’ Favorite Read More »
Writing Divine Presence in Bronze Age Fiction as Lived Reality Rather Than Abstraction. Mythological fiction has a problem that most writers fail to solve: the gods are either too large or too small. Made too large, they do not inhabit the story; they furnish it. Artemis stands for chastity, Aphrodite for desire, Athena for wisdom,
Gods Who Are Not Metaphors Read More »
What the Mythological Tradition Preserves and What the Novelist Discovers Beneath It. There is a kind of silence in ancient sources that is not absence but compression. The authors who mention Atalanta—Hesiod in fragments, Pindar, Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias, Ovid, Hyginus—do not bother to explain her. They assume their audience knows who she is. The
Atalanta Before She Was a Myth Read More »
The question arrived before I wrote a single page of Asterios and the Labyrinth. I was standing by the reconstructed Tripartite Shrine at Knossos, watching other visitors move past without pausing, and I thought: I have to put a character here. He has to believe something about what he sees. And I do not know
Writing the Unknown: How Historical Fiction Reconstructs Ancient Greek Religion Read More »
On the distance between the Bronze Age world of Atalanta of the Wild and the Classical Greece readers bring to the page, and why that distance matters to the fiction. Most readers arrive at a Bronze Age novel carrying Greece with them—the Greece of the Parthenon, of the city-state, of the agora, and of the
The Mycenaeans Were Not the Greeks Read More »
For those who wish to explore the relationship between Homer, the Bronze Age, and the archaeological record—and to understand why the distance between them matters to anyone who writes in that world. A historical novelist working in the Bronze Age Aegean faces a problem no amount of imagination alone can solve: the world he is
Seven Books That Will Make You a Better Historical Fiction Writer Read More »
On the distance between The Iliad and The Odyssey and what archaeology reveals—and why a historical novelist must navigate between them. Every reader who comes to Bronze Age historical fiction arrives carrying Homer. The wine-dark sea, the rage of Achilles, the cunning of Odysseus are the furniture of the Western imagination when it turns toward
Homer’s World Is Not the Bronze Age Read More »
I can offer no other explanation: I close my eyes and travel. The ancient Mediterranean worlds of the tales I write lie some 9,600 kilometers from my writing desk in Rio de Janeiro, and yet, in the solitude of the working hours—the cell phone on mute, the tropical city going about its business beyond the
Rio de Janeiro and the Bronze Age: Writing Ancient Worlds from a Modern City Read More »
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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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.
Myths That Have Haunted Me Since Youth Read More »
