Here are 39 books that The Heracles of Euripides fans have personally recommended if you like
The Heracles of Euripides.
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My training is in Classics (especially Greek drama), which has given me an appreciation for clever writers who tweak conventional themes to surprise readers, foil expectations, and explore new ideas—or new sides of old ideas. Greek epic and tragedy also exhibit fairly rigid expectations about personal responsibility: even if a god made you do it, it’s still your responsibility. Agamemnon has to pay for sacrificing his daughter; Heracles has to perform his labors. Madness and possession are vivid ways to explore where one’s autonomy leaves off and another power takes over. They’re excellent tools for poking at humans to see how a thinking, feeling individual deals with unintended disaster.
The Bloodwrath is basically Berserkergang, not possession, right? It affects badgers almost exclusively. What a bummer to be a badger and bear a burden that no one else has!
But it’s a bit more like possession in this book. Lady Cregga has the Bloodwrath more strongly than anyone has ever observed before; her personality seems to reflect this, as she’s impatient, brusque, and aggressive (even for a badger). She’s wounded and loses her sight, and the Bloodwrath goes away.
Even though her personality appears to be tied up with her madness, the Bloodwrath must be something external, since it can leave her without destroying her. Is it an inborn quality or an effect brought about by her personal choices, an appetite that can be satiated, or something else?
The tenth book in the beloved, bestselling Redwall saga - soon to be a major Netflix movie!
Tammo dreams of joining the Long Patrol, the legendary army of fighting hares who serve Lady Cregga Rose Eyes, ruler of Salamandastron. And with Damug Warfang's mighty battalion of savage vermin on the rampage, young Tammo's dream is about to become a brutal reality . . .
My training is in Classics (especially Greek drama), which has given me an appreciation for clever writers who tweak conventional themes to surprise readers, foil expectations, and explore new ideas—or new sides of old ideas. Greek epic and tragedy also exhibit fairly rigid expectations about personal responsibility: even if a god made you do it, it’s still your responsibility. Agamemnon has to pay for sacrificing his daughter; Heracles has to perform his labors. Madness and possession are vivid ways to explore where one’s autonomy leaves off and another power takes over. They’re excellent tools for poking at humans to see how a thinking, feeling individual deals with unintended disaster.
The brand of possession is fairly standard: a Drakhaoul possesses a man, enabling him to transform into a dragon—but the man must replenish his strength vampirically.
I like the interplay of personal responsibility and victimization, the use of supernatural powers to protect one’s friends at the cost of innocent suffering.
The Drakhaoul has a name and personality; it’s definitely a discrete being, but it’s also a part of the hero.
But then the hero successfully exorcises his demon.
But the demon’s memories are left behind, and the hero starts to wonder if he’s going mad.
The demon’s absence, not its presence, drives the hero to madness and despair (even though he hates the demon).
The hero simultaneously hates and longs for a dark power, which is and is not uniquely his.
A weaver of tales, a caster of spells, and a writer of rare imagination, Sarah Ash lends her unique vision to epic fantasy. In this captivating continuation to her story, the author of Lord of Snow and Shadows revisits a realm filled with spirits and singers, daemons and kings.
Gavril Nagarian has finally cast out the dragon-daemon from deep within himself. The Drakhaoul is gone—and with it all of Gavril’s fearsome powers. Though no longer besieged by the Drakhaoul’s unnatural lusts and desires, Gavril has betrayed his birthright and his people. He has put the ice-bound princedom of Azhkendir at…
My training is in Classics (especially Greek drama), which has given me an appreciation for clever writers who tweak conventional themes to surprise readers, foil expectations, and explore new ideas—or new sides of old ideas. Greek epic and tragedy also exhibit fairly rigid expectations about personal responsibility: even if a god made you do it, it’s still your responsibility. Agamemnon has to pay for sacrificing his daughter; Heracles has to perform his labors. Madness and possession are vivid ways to explore where one’s autonomy leaves off and another power takes over. They’re excellent tools for poking at humans to see how a thinking, feeling individual deals with unintended disaster.
This book features a sort of contest between “real-world” and “fantasy-world” accounts of the hero’s behavior.
Some warriors experience “the Thrill” when they fight: battle is invigorating (because it gets your blood, oxygen, and adrenaline flowing); this is the stuff of modern psychology or biology.
No, wait, the Thrill is basically a supernatural being. Naturally: Sanderson’s world incorporates creatures who appear when various strong emotions are in play. But his handling of psychology is realistic in other respects, so that explanation makes sense, too….
But why does the Thrill affect the hero more than others? Maybe he’s just a bloodthirsty barbarian. No, wait, he has a special relationship with the supernatural creature. But doesn’t that mean they’re kindred spirits, and maybe the hero is a bloodthirsty barbarian?
The #1 New York Times bestselling sequel to Words of Radiance, from epic fantasy author Brandon Sanderson at the top of his game.
In Oathbringer, the third volume of the New York Times bestselling Stormlight Archive, humanity faces a new Desolation with the return of the Voidbringers, a foe with numbers as great as their thirst for vengeance.
Dalinar Kholin’s Alethi armies won a fleeting victory at a terrible cost: The enemy Parshendi summoned the violent Everstorm, which now sweeps the world with destruction, and in its passing awakens the once peaceful and subservient parshmen to the horror of their…
My training is in Classics (especially Greek drama), which has given me an appreciation for clever writers who tweak conventional themes to surprise readers, foil expectations, and explore new ideas—or new sides of old ideas. Greek epic and tragedy also exhibit fairly rigid expectations about personal responsibility: even if a god made you do it, it’s still your responsibility. Agamemnon has to pay for sacrificing his daughter; Heracles has to perform his labors. Madness and possession are vivid ways to explore where one’s autonomy leaves off and another power takes over. They’re excellent tools for poking at humans to see how a thinking, feeling individual deals with unintended disaster.
You’re soon going to notice that I like clever variations on a common theme.
This book is a really fun mishmash of possible ways for possession to happen: a person can be possessed by a friendly ghost, a malevolent demon—or both at once! The heroine travels back in time (unusual for fantasy) and possesses the ghost when she was still alive. Two good guys can occupy the same body without surrendering their autonomy; but one can also take over when the other’s strength fails.
I also like the interweaving of the protagonist’s adventures in both the past and the present with chapters from a thousand-year-old journal. The temporal complexity works well with the way the characters fold into each other.
Magic, danger, and adventure abound for messenger Karigan G'ladheon in the second book in Kristen Britain's New York Times-bestselling Green Rider fantasy series
Karigan G'ladheon was once a Green Rider, one of the king of Sacoridia's elite magical messengers. In the messenger service, she was caught up in a world of deadly danger, and though she defeated the rogue Eletian who cracked the magical D'Yer Wall-which had protected Sacoridia for a thousand years from the dark influence of Blackveil Forest, and Mornhavon the Black's evil spirit imprisoned within it-she had nonetheless been tainted by his wild magic.
My passion for Greek literature began as a child when I was captivated by Greek myths and epic tales. As a student, I became fascinated with tragic revenge plots involving women, especially mothers who kill their children, and since then, I have published extensively on gender and violence in ancient Greek literature and life. I speak modern Greek and love thinking about these topics in traditional Greek folk poetry and literature as well, especially works like Alexandros Papadiamantis’ The Murderess and Pantelis Prevelakis’ The Sun of Death.
This lucidly written scholarly book considers how revenge was understood in ancient Athens and what the implications of this understanding are for reading tragedies whose plot lines feature revenge.
My favourite chapter is the one on Sophocles’ fragmentary Tereus, in which Procne takes revenge against her husband, Tereus, for raping and mutilating her sister Philomela, by killing her son Itys and serving him to his father in a pie. It is a compelling and horrifying storyline that influenced Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.
Burnett’s careful reading seeks to reconstruct the fragments of the play to explain how the playwright delivered this extreme violence as a tragic revenge plot.
Modern readings of ancient Athenian drama tend to view it as a presentation of social or moral problems, as if ancient drama showed the same realism seen on the present-day stage. Such views are belied by the plays themselves, in which supremely violent actions occur in a legendary time and place distinct both from reality and from the ethics of ordinary life. Offering fresh readings of Attic tragedy, Anne Pippin Burnett urges readers to peel away twentieth-century attitudes toward vengeance and reconsider the revenge tragedies of ancient Athens in their own context. After a consideration of how our view of…
I wrote my first thriller at age 8 about a girl who ran away and joined the circus. For later works, I, a pediatric physician, did opt to follow my English teachers’ guidance to write about what you know, including science, medicine, psychology, journalism, and my twin home countries of America and Greece. As YS Pascal, I wrote the Zygan Emprise Trilogy, which blended ancient Greek history, mythology, and literature. As Linda Reid, I co-authored the award-winning Sammy Greene thriller series with Dr. Deborah Shlian and was eager to fly investigative reporter Sammy and her ex-cop friend Gus Pappajohn to the shores of modern Athens to solve an ancient and modern mystery.
As an author of mystery-thrillers, including the Sherlock Holmes Pastiche, “Elementary, My Dear Spock” as well as a longtime fan of Agatha Christie, I was drawn to the appeal of an ancient Greek “detective”, Heracles Pontor investigating murders in Plato’s Athens. And, Somoza does not disappoint, inviting us to share Pontor’s journey down a rabbit hole that grows ever more intriguing and dangerous page by page. Somoza welcomes us with a beautifully translated murder mystery that soon envelopes us in a fascinating exploration of Plato, reality, and, as reflected in the original Spanish title, the Cave of Ideas.
THE ATHENIAN MURDERS is a brilliant, very entertaining and absolutely original literary mystery, revolving round two intertwined riddles. In classical Athens, one of the pupils of Plato's Academy is found dead. His idealistic teacher suspects that this wasn't an accident and asks Herakles, known as the 'Decipherer of Enigmas', to investigate the death and ultimately a dark, irrational and subversive cult. The second plot unfolds in parallel through the footnotes of the translator of the text. As he proceeds with his work, he becomes increasingly convinced that the original author has hidden a second meaning, which can be brought to…
When I tell people I think about Greek myths for a living, they tend not to believe me. But I’ve never considered Greek myths to be at all odd or mysterious. After all, telling stories is a very normal human activity. Most recently I’ve been working to better understand how ancient communities attached stories to the places they lived in and this has resulted in MANTO, a huge mapping project, which anyone can look at here: https://www.manto-myth.org/manto
This book is all you could ever have wanted to know about the monsters of Greek myth and the impact they have had on our imaginations. It’s a collaboration resulting in 40 articles that range across various monsters, monster theory, and the strange borders between the real and the imaginary.
The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth presents forty chapters about the unique and terrifying creatures from myths of the long-ago Near East and Mediterranean world, featuring authoritative contributions by many of the top international experts on ancient monsters and the monstrous. The first part provides original studies of individual monsters such as the Chimaera, Cerberus, the Hydra, and the Minotaur, and of monster groups such as dragons, centaurs, sirens, and Cyclopes. This section also explores their encounters with the major heroes of classical myth, including Perseus, Jason, Heracles, and Odysseus. The second part examines monsters of ancient folklore…
As a poet and a novelist, I'm fascinated by the places where these two genres meet, undo each other, and create something new again. That sounds a lot like what love can do, and whenever I read a long poem that achieves a unique aesthetic unity, I feel the writer has found a new way to love the world, to love the reader. And, as usual, both the world and the reader are challenged by that love—to grow.
On the spectrum that ranges from narrative fragmentation to narrative linearity, this verse novel triumphs in its capacity to compel the reader both to turn the page and linger over every fine phrase.
A remarkably contemporary retelling of ancient myth, Autobiography of Red reminds us that the ancient stories are the new ones. As the poet Linda Gregg once wrote, “The singers change, the music goes on.” This is a must-read for all students of poetry and lovers of literary experimentation.
In this extraordinary epic poem, Anne Carson bridges the gap between classicism and the modern, poetry and prose, with a volcanic journey into the soul of a winged red monster named Geryon.
There is a strong mixture of whimsy and sadness in Geryon's story. He is tormented as a boy by his brother, escapes to a parallel world of photography, and falls in love with Herakles - a golden young man who leaves Geryon at the peak of infatuation. Geryon retreats ever further into the world created by his camera, until that glass house is suddenly and irrevocably shattered by…
Most people have not heard of a female playwright before Aphra Behn so I’ve been passionate about restoring the work of Shakespeare’s ‘sisters’, or female contemporaries, to the stage and to public awareness. Early play scripts by women are often dismissed as ‘closet drama’: unperformed, not written for performance, and unperformable. To challenge such assumptions, I staged productions of female-authored plays, most recently Wroth’sLove’s Victory. A good deal of writing about women’s drama now exists, including my book Playing Spaces.I have made this selection to encourage you to discover the plays for yourselves. I hope you enjoy reading, and perhaps watching or acting, them.
This very handy anthology includes the only modern edition ofThe Tragedie of Iphigenia(1557-9), by Jane Lumley, the first person to translate Euripides into English and the first English woman to write a full-length play.
It is a surprisingly modern-sounding script, featuring a father sacrificing his daughter, not unlike Stannis Barathean in Game of Thrones, and I loved producing and taking part in a production in 2013-14. Also included are Antonius translated by Mary [Sidney Herbert], Countess of Pembroke, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam.
Unlike the anthology above, this edition publishes the plays in their original old spelling so you can get a feel of Renaissance English. Diane Purkiss offers a concise introduction and notes at the back of the book.
This volume contains unmodernized versions of plays by each of the three leading Renaissance women dramatists: Elizabeth Cary's "The Tragedie of Mariam" (1613), the story of the plight of a woman married against her will to an unbending tyrant; June Lumley's version of Euripides' "Iphigenia" (1550), the earliest surviving translation of a Greek tragedy; and Mary Sidney's "Antonie" (1590), a blank verse translation of a French Senecan play. Intended for private production, all three were able to address contentious political issues - the nature of the good ruler, resistance to unjust authority - which were seldom permitted on the public…
I’ve always been curious about how stories shape how we see the world. As a child, I noticed there were countless conflicting stories explaining how things worked. But which stories were the real ones? Which were true? At university, I studied the stories we tell ourselves about how the world will end. And as we live in times that can feel quite apocalyptic, I’m particularly fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what the future holds. If society dissolved around us, what stories would we tell ourselves to keep going? Are we telling those stories now?
This play, which I’ve read as a script but not seen performed, is a genuine treat. It hits the sweet spot for me: it is a delicious cross-section of ‘post-apocalyptic’ and ‘stories about stories.'
I also loved it for just how weird it was. It’s such a bizarre–yet realistic–depiction of how stories change over time, and it’s the only thing I’ve ever read that has made me want to write a play. It’s probably the oddest text I ever recommend to people.
"One of the most spectacularly original plays in recent memory."Entertainment Weekly
"Fascinating and hilarious . . . With each of its three acts, Mr. Burns grows grander."Village Voice
"When was the last time you met a new play that was so smart it made your head spin? . . . Mr. Burns has arrived to leave you dizzy with the scope and dazzle of its ideas . . . with depths of feeling to match its breadth of imagination."The New York Times
An ode to live theater and the resilience of The Simpsons, Anne Washburn's apocalyptic comedy Mr. Burns"even better…
