The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

The story of Achilles has been passed down through the ages and adapted countless times, most recently in Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, but also in less successful interpretations of the tale (Brad Pitt in Troy, I'm looking at you). The Song of Achilles (2011) by Madeline Miller offers an entirely new perspective altogether. It is something of an origins story, but most unusually is that it is told through the eyes of Achilles' lover, Patroclus.

We first meet Patroclus as a young boy. His mother, he tells us, is simple and he lives under the constant disapproving gaze of his fat... Read More

Circe by Madeline Miller

“When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Thus begins Circe’s self-told tale, and the yet-to-be-invented descriptor she references here is “witch,” though it could just as easily, and perhaps more significantly for this story, be “independent woman,” since both concepts, it turns out, are equally confounding to Titan, Olympian, and mortal alike, much to the reader’s satisfaction.

Beyond that bedeviling of the uber-powerful, there’s a lot that satisfies (and more) here: Madeline Miller’s lovely prose, how she stays faithful to the myths but fills the spaces between them with a rich originality, the manner in which the tale creates tension despite the fact we know how many of its parts end, the many times we dip into and out of storytelling as we hear of Theseus and the Minotaur or Achilles and Hector, and the way the familiar is constantly being told slan... Read More

SHORTS: In this week's column we review several short fiction works that we've read recently, including three more of the current Retro Hugo nominees from 1943.

“Galatea” by Madeline Miller (2013, $3.99 on Kindle; anthologized in xo Orpheus, edited by Kate Bernheimer)

In the Roman myth of Read More