A picture book based on the legend of Arion, the young musician whose friendship with the dolphin that saves his life is ended when the dolphin is captured and dies. Jane Ray's luscious, evocative paintings harmonize with the text, a wonderful mixture of verse and prose adapted from Vikram Seth's libretto for an opera commissioned by the English National Opera.
Arion's Lyre examines how Hellenistic poetic culture adapted, reinterpreted, and transformed Archaic Greek lyric through a complex process of textual, cultural, and creative reception. Looking at the ways in which the poetry of Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Simonides was preserved, edited, and read by Hellenistic scholars and poets, the book shows that Archaic poets often look very different in the new social, cultural, and political setting of Hellenistic Alexandria. For example, the Alexandrian Sappho evolves from the singer of Archaic Lesbos but has distinct associations and contexts, from Ptolemaic politics and Macedonian queens to the new phenomenon of the poetry book and an Alexandrian scholarship intent on preservation and codification. A study of Hellenistic poetic culture and an interpretation of some of the Archaic poets it so lovingly preserved, Arion's Lyre is also an examination of how one poetic culture reads another--and how modern readings of ancient poetry are filtered and shaped by earlier readings.
A most untraditional love story, this is the celebrated tale of Henry DeTamble, a dashing, adventuresome librarian who inadvertently travels through time, and Clare Abshire, an artist whose life takes a natural sequential course. Henry and Clare’s passionate affair endures across a sea of time and captures them in an impossibly romantic trap that tests the strength of fate and basks in the bonds of love. “Niffenegger’s inventive and poignant writing is well worth a trip” (Entertainment Weekly).
The history of any skilled urban trade is ultimately tied to the growth and development of the city in which it is located. From its humble eighteenth-century beginnings, instrument making grew to be one of New York City's most sizable and important trades. By the 1840s, the city was the largest producer of instruments in the Western Hemisphere, and, in the decades that followed, designs and innovations pioneered by New York artisans influenced and inspired instrument makers throughout the world. Although many of the these instruments survive in American museums, there existed no comprehensive guide to their makers. Nancy Groce's biographical dictionary chronicles all of these master craftsmen in colorful detail, from the obscure work of Geoffry Stafford in 1691, to the zenith of the 1890s, and on to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
He lives on the 13th floor of New YorkÕs Carney Hall Building, crammed into a tiny room filled with memorabilia. He makes a living scamming tourists at three-card monte and chess and makes his friends among the denizens of Washington Square Park and the Lower East Side. HeÕs ARION THE IMMORTAL, once the most powerful sorcerer of them all, not to mention the king of the world. But now heÕs just another old man in the streets of the city, taking his pleasure in the company of young Amanda and delighting in shortchanging his archnemesis, the Lord of Chaos, now a deli owner on the Lower East Side. Yep, the ImmortalÕs life was pretty quiet and complete...until Darkworld fell asleep again, to dream the Dream that gave birth to Atlantean magic, forcing the Immortal to leave the quiet of his present existence and take up the mantle of the old days.
Ovid's Fasti, unlike his Metamorphoses, is anchored in Rome: religion, history and legend, monuments, and character. The poem interprets the Augustan period not as a golden age of peace and prosperity, Carole E. Newlands asserts, but as an age of experimentation, negotiation, compromise, and unresolved tensions. Newlands maintains that, despite the Fasti's basic adherence to the format of the calendar, the text is carefully constructed to reflect the tensions within its subject: the new Roman year. Ovid plays with the calendar. Through the alteration or omission of significant dates, through skilled juxtapositions, through multiple narrators and the development of an increasingly unreliable authorial persona, Ovid opens to a critical and often humorous scrutiny the political ideology of the calendar. By adding astronomical observations and aetiological explanations for certain constellations, Newlands says, Ovid introduced the richly allusive world of Greek mythology to the calendar. Newlands restores the poem to a position of importance, one displaying Ovid's wit and intellect at its best. The incompleteness of the Fasti, she adds, is a comment on the discord that characterized Augustus' later years and led to enforced silences.
