Lamia

In a dusky Cretan brake, a jewel-bright serpent weeps through a woman’s mouth—and asks Hermes to give her back her human shape.

In John Keats’s 1819 narrative poem, gods, nymphs and satyrs haunt the forests and shores of ancient Greece. Hermes has come to Crete in pursuit of a nymph hidden from mortal eyes when Lamia, a serpent marked with stars and vivid color, offers to reveal her. Her price is a woman’s body—and the chance to find Lycius, the young Corinthian she loves. A divine bargain is struck, but what waits for Lamia in the human world she longs to enter?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.