Atwood regulars will be familiar with some of The Penelopiad’s themes: voiceless women, untrustworthy narrators, gender stereotypes. Penelope herself narrates from the Underworld, with the hanged maids (who in life acted as Penelope’s confidantes and spies) providing a chorus alternately haunting and vaudevillian in tone and form.

Fortunately for the reader, this bout between authorial heavyweights is prone less to serious pummelling of the subject matter than to the fancy thematic footwork and feinting that is characteristic of Atwood’s most compelling work. The premise for Atwood’s entry is the “inconsistencies” in The Odyssey surrounding Penelope in her long years of waiting for her husband’s return from war, and the subsequent slaughter by Odysseus of not only his wife’s corrupt, usurping suitors but also a dozen maids the hero deems guilty by association. publisher Jamie Byng of Canongate Books, will encompass Greek, Aztec, Hindu, Norse, Biblical, and African myths, and includes a scholarly overview of mythic literature by the British historian of religion Karen Armstrong. How to begin passing judgment on one of the first in a new series of books that touts “top-class writers from all over the world” retelling history’s greatest myths, and boasts 26 co-publishers internationally to date? The series, spearheaded by U.K. Reporting ringside as The Odyssey and Margaret Atwood square off is pretty intimidating stuff.

Atwood the penelopiad