This book is unfiltered Anne Carson: playful and serious, deep and accessible, flippant and reverent. It contains beautiful prose and a legitimate argument: who Heracles is, why we think about him incorrectly, and what our relationship with myth (and heroics) should be (or perhaps not be.) It is a strange artifact (I think the doodles, fun as they were, could have been excised from the affair.)

I think people are tempted to fall into a trap of defining Anne Carson — is she a translator, or a transliterator, or something different? I don't think it matters very much. She is a storyteller — she is not updating or transforming stories told for hundreds of years so much as conversing with them, and using them to tell new and in some cases more powerful ones.

★★★★