The Rage of Achilles - Softcover

Hawkins, Terence

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934081205 ISBN 13: 9781934081204

Publisher: Casperian Books LLC, 2009

Synopsis

In his first book, The Rage of Achilles,  Terence Hawkins imagines an Iliad that really happened. Informed by the brutal realities of Bronze Age warfare and Julian Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind--now a basis for HBO's Westworld--the novel depicts real men and women struggling in the end of a decade-long war, their gods dwindling into hallucinations and half-heard commands as the modern consciousness is suddenly and painfully born. Emily Hauser, author of  For the Most Beautiful, said:  "Terence Hawkins' 'The Rage of Achilles' . . . is Greek myth red in tooth and claw. Visceral and to-the-point, it grabs you and doesn't let go."  Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and The Leftovers, called it "a rare thing--a genuinely fresh take on a classic text."

About this title

From the Back Cover

"THE RAGE OF ACHILLES is that rare thing--a genuinely fresh take on a classic text. Terry Hawkins' modern retelling of THE ILIAD has the paradoxical, invigorating effect of making Homer's epic feel oddly familiar, and of highlighting its deep strangeness at the same time."

TOM PERROTTA, Author of Election, Little Children, and The Abstinence Teacher.

"The outcome of the Trojan War is a matter of history, but in this masterful account by Terence Hawkins it is infused it with all the immediacy of a current event. The action of the story never flags, and is kept at a furious pitch throughout. It is a book that can well be read at a single sitting, then re-read to savor the brilliance of the writing. As Hawkins reinvents the Trojan War, he does so at the limit of what the reader can bear. Blood is perpetually recreated as a brute fact. It has to be shed, for that is its destiny. The battles are depicted in the most graphic and shocking detail in which the bloodshed has an almost sacrificial implication without which it would be not nearly so moving. Read it and see for yourself."

RICHARD SELZER, Author of Confessions of a Knife and The Doctor Stories.

About the Author

Terence Hawkins grew up in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania. His home county, which the state police call Fayette Nam, is the setting for Philipp Meyer's American Rust and the original Night of the Living Dead. His grandfathers and several uncles were coal miners. He graduated from Yale, where he was publisher of the Yale Daily News. He attended the University of Wisconsin Law School and returned to New Haven in 1985 to practice as a trial lawyer.  In 2011, Hawkins became the founding Director of the Yale Writers' Conference, which he ran until 2015. In 2014, he started the Company of Writers, which offers workshops and manuscript services to writers at all levels of experience.  The Rage of Achilles is Hawkins' first novel.  

Edition details

• Publisher: Casperian Books LLC
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1934081205
• ISBN 13: 9781934081204
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 198