Judith Starkston has spent too much time exploring the remains of the ancient worlds of the Greeks and Hittites. Their myths and clashes inspire her fiction and open gates to magical realms. She has degrees in Classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cornell. She loves myths and telling stories, and her novels imbue fantasy with the richness of ancient worlds. The first book in her Trojan Threads Series, Hand of Fire was a semi-finalist for the M.M. Bennett’s Award for Historical Fiction. Priestess of Ishana, the first in her historical fantasy Tesha series, won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith is represented by Richard Curtis.
Classics professor emeritus, Erich S. Gruen, offers hope that we can overcome our ingrained impulse toward demonizing the “other” through his analysis of Greek, Roman, and Jewish thought in his new book, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity. His argument is briefly laid out in a commentary from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Who were the Trojans? Probably a people called Luwian who were part of the extended Hittite world.
1. For those of you who have stood in front of a museum case of gorgeous Greek vases and wondered what it all meant, here is a guide from the Wall Street Journal to get you started. For a more detailed version, you’ll have to fly me to your location and I’ll gladly explain all the juicy mythological details. (Just kidding, although once in the British Museum with my son perched on my shoulders, I did turn to discover I was being followed by a large group as I told him the wild tales depicted on the vases in front… Read More »In the Ancient News: “Reading” Greek pots; Israeli mosaic tours US
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins I was given a copy of these poems by Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room, recently, and they are a delightful companion. As such they cannot rightly ever be stowed in the already read file because I will return as often as my soul needs to. I highly recommend a copy by everyone’s bedside. How can you not love a book of poems in which one can find these two stanzas in a poem called Forgetfulness? The name of the author is the first to go followed… Read More »Poetry
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy SchiffMy rating: 5 of 5 stars “How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?” This, Schiff tells us, is what Cecil B. DeMille asked Claudette Colbert when offering her the movie role of Cleopatra. It’s an indication that with the Egyptian queen, “In the match between the lady and the legend there is no contest.” Cleopatra’s story was told first by her vanquishers and later by men wildly incapable of facing the reality of a smart, immensely powerful woman. Stacy Schiff, in her superb biography of Cleopatra, does her best to repair… Read More »Cleopatra: A Life, Stacy Schiff
In the category of guilty pleasures, I happily place mysteries set in interesting historical settings. I recently picked up The Tomb of Zeus (2007), the first of Barbara Cleverly’s series set in Europe after World War I, featuring Laetitia Talbot, an independent young woman of means with a penchant for archaeology and mysteries. If you enjoy the conventions of the upper class British mystery and archaeological digs, you’ll have fun with this one. For the sake of suspense, Cleverly sometimes holds back information in ways that push credulity a bit, given that some of the key pieces were always in… Read More »Review of Tomb of Zeus
For a novelist, a beautiful or mystifying object preserved from the past can trigger an entire scene. An ancient setting with so many exotic and intriguing elements is particularly fruitful this way. I thought when I started writing fiction that my training as a classicist and years of teaching humanities, with its interplay between cultural artifacts, history and literature, had taught me enough to portray a town near Troy on the eve of the Trojan War. Every time a character reaches for something, wears clothes, eats food, travels or sits down, I had to know what might actually have existed—a… Read More »The Silver Stag Rhyton
Isabel Allende’s latest novel, Island Beneath the Sea (April 2010), brings us into the 18th century world of slavery and revolution in Saint Domingue, Cuba and New Orleans. It follows the life of Zarité, a nine year old slave girl sold to Toulouse Valmorain, a French plantation owner in Saint Domingue (later Haiti). Allende’s richly drawn world envelops the reader, but even more compelling are the narrative voices telling this complex, interwoven story. The novel shifts between chapters told by Zarité herself in first person and an omniscient voice, which manages to express an ironic distain for the deficiencies and… Read More »Review of Island Beneath the Sea
