Women and Monsters

The women and monsters of Greek mythology rarely get to speak for themselves.

Sing, Muse, for yourself.

Eurydice wanders an abandoned amusement park despite her husband's love. Ariadne becomes addicted to gypsy magic long after she was left on an island. Iphigenia dies at Aulis, confused and scared. Deianira kills her famous husband, Hercules, and feels like she slayed a monster. Korey thinks of leaving her mother, her small town, her mundane, simple life. There are monsters, too: Charybdis and Scylla, Cerynitis, Gorgon, and more.

This collection of stories from Rhysling and Crawford Prize-nominated fantasy writer, J. M. McDermott embraces the surreal and hallucinatory traditions of Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, and The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy, to tell the stories that are always absent from the official books of history.

There are as many versions of the myth as there are grandmothers in Greece. There are always more myths, more versions.