Preorder - My Iliad Odyssey - A Memoir
At a dead end as a fiction reader and writer, Art Edwards found on his bookshelf a used copy of the Iliad, which he’d never read. He set aside two hours a week, Sunday from 9 to 11 a.m., for the slow, focused study of this cornerstone of the western canon. He would allow the process to take him wherever it would, whether that meant the ultimate answer to his reading and writing conundrums or the abandonment of the practices entirely.
My Iliad Odyssey reveals Edwards’s journey into the heart of Homer. Composed of a modern, at times humorous, retelling of the classic work, each chapter prompts a look beyond Troy into some bigger, often personal, aspect of Edwards’s life or the world around him. During his three years of meticulously reading the Iliad, he saw his mother pass away from cancer, resolved a decades-long frustration with a former music colleague, andfound a new focus for his creative pursuits. He went to the Iliad to save his fiction reading and writing life, but like any Greek myth, the rewards weren’t what he expected them to be.