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Reading lists

8 literary mazes to explore

The Fall of Icarus

'Drawn on by his eagerness for the open sky, he left his guide and soared upwards...' 
 
Ovid tells the tales of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, the Calydonian Boar-Hunt, and many other famous myths. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Ovid (c.43 BCE-17 CE). Ovid's other works available in Penguin Classics are The Erotic Poems, Fasti, Heroides and Metamorphoses.

Penguin Classics

Metamorphoses

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Ovid's deliciously clever and exuberant epic, now in a gorgeous new clothbound edition designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. These delectable and collectable editions are bound in high-quality, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design 
 
Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy. Erudite but light-hearted, dramatic yet playful, theMetamorphoses has influenced writers and artists throughout the centuries from Shakespeare and Titian to Picasso and Ted Hughes. 
 
Ovid (43BC-18AD) was born at Sulmo (Sulmona) in central Italy. Coming from a wealthy Roman family and seemingly destined for a career in politics, he held minor official posts before leaving public service to write, becoming the most distinguished poet of his time. His works, all published in Penguin Classics, include Amores, a collection of short love poems; Heroides, verse-letters written by mythological heroines to their lovers; Ars Amatoria, a satirical handbook on love; and Metamorphoses, his epic work that has inspired countless writers and artists through the ages. 
 
David Raeburn is a lecturer in Classics at Oxford, and has also translated Sophocles' Electra and Other Plays for Penguin Classics. 
 
Denis Feeney is Professor of Classics at Princeton.

The Metamorphoses

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Hardback gift edition of Ovid's masterpiece. The Metamorphoses still has the power to provoke and amuse, as readers will find from this masterly new verse translation by Allen Mandelbaum.

Publius Ovidius Naso, known to the English world as Ovid, was born in 43 BC in the Abruzzo, Italy, studied oratory in Rome and travelled to Greece. Intended for public career, he instead devoted himself to poetry. Amongst his other works are the Amores (loves), Heroides (heroines) and the Arts Amatoria (art of love). For reasons which remain unclear, he was banished to the Black Sea by the Emperor Augustus in AD 8. Grief-stricken, he composed there his Tristia (elegies). He was never allowed to return to Rome, and died in exile in AD 17. 
 
TRANSLATOR BIOGRAPHY: 
Allen Mandelbaum was born in 1926 and died in 2011. His translations of Homer, Dante, Virgil, Quasimodo and Ungaretti have all been published to great critical acclaim. For the Aeneid he won the National Book Award. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. 
 
INTRODUCER BIOGRAPHY: 
Formerly a Research Fellow and Senior Tutor at the University of Cambridge, J.C. McKeown is now Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His publications include a commentary on Ovid’s Amores and A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities. He is currently working on The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature which will be published in summer 2013.

One of the founding texts of Western literature, the Metamorphoses is nevertheless anything but earnest or off-putting. Ovid’s sequence of fifteen witty and playful poems sketches the history of the world from its creation to the poet’s own time through a series of transformation myths in which gods and goddesses succumb to all-too-human passions, not least in the matter of love. Frequently translated, imitated and paraphrased.

The Art of Love

'Any man who shows, with such poetic readability, that what is happening between the sexes today was happening two thousand years ago - and that, therefore, the beating out of one's guilt-ridden, female brains is something of a waste of time - has to be a hero' - Independent

The Art of Love may have been written in the days of gladiators and emperors, but Ovid remains the smartest teacher on the subject of love in all of history. His advice is enduringly useful and entertaining. Between these covers you'll find all you need to know about where to meet a new beau, how to handle illicit affairs and how to maintain your allure. 
 
This edition also contains the companion volume The Cure for Love - just in case things don't work out. 
 
TRANSLATED BY TOM PAYNE AND INTRODUCED BY HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON

With its jaunty, cunning and infernally clever rhyming couplets, Tom Payne's new translation is an utter treat from first to last...a sparkling foreword by Hephzibah Anderson...this effervescent Art of Love will be a lasting joy.

This sums Ovid up: Cerebral and sensual; but wit first

His wit, fluency and erotic treatises made him one of the most influential writers of ancient times

Much of Ovid's advice would not go amiss today

With its jaunty, cunning and infernally clever rhyming couplets, Tom Payne's new translation is an utter treat... Payne's commentary, and a sparkling foreword by Hephzibah Anderson, make the clear the deep gulf that separates his world from ours. Nonetheless, this effervescent Art of Love will be a lasting joy... On Valentine's, and indeed every other day, legalistic lovers would do well to mark his words

Pious and bawdy by turns, advocating high-mindedness, Ovid keeps readers guessing as to his true opinions. Payne's new translations steers a generally steady course between cheekiness and gravitas, while his footnotes - which reference Delia Smith, Joni Mitchell and Woody Allen - add an eccentric gloss.

Payne's notes are excellent... commendably lively in the spirit of Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Italy on 20 March 43 BC. He was educated in Rome and worked as a public official before taking up poetry full-time. His earliest surviving work is the collection of love poems called the Amores, which was followed by the Heroides. The Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love) and the Remedia Amoris (The Cure for Love) were probably written between 2 BC and 2 AD. These were followed by his two epic poems the Fasti and the Metamorphoses. In 8 AD Ovid fell out of favour with the Emperor Augustus due to a 'carmen et error' ('a poem and a mistake') and was banished to what is now Romania. While in exile he wrote Tristia, Ibis and the Epistulae ex Ponto which consists of letters appealing for help in his efforts to be recalled to Rome. Ovid died in exile in 18 AD. 
 
Tom Payne was born in 1971. He read Classics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. For four years he was deputy literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. He lives with his wife and three daughters in Dorset, and teaches English and Classics at Sherborne School.

The perfect gift for Valentine’s Day 
 
TRANSLATED BY TOM PAYNE AND INTRODUCED BY HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON 
 
The Art of Love may have been written in the days of gladiators and emperors, but Ovid remains the smartest teacher on the subject of love in all of history, and his advice is enduringly useful and entertaining. Between these covers you'll find all you need to know about where to meet a new beau, how to handle illicit affairs and how to maintain your allure. This edition also contains the companion volume The Cure for Love - in case things don't work out.

Metamorphosis

Mary Innes's classic translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, Ovid's Metamorphosis.

Mary Innes's classic prose translation of one of the supreme masterpieces of Latin literature, Ovid's Metamorphosis. 
 
Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to create a series of narrative poems, ingeniously linked by the common theme of transformation. Here a chaotic universe is subdued into harmonious order: animals turn to stone; men and women become trees and stars. Ovid himself transformed the art of storytelling, infusing these stories with new life through his subtley, humour and understanding of human nature, and elegantly tailoring tone and pace to fit a variety of subjects. The result is a lasting treasure-house of myth and legend. 
 
'The most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)' - Ezra Pound 
 
Ovid was born in 43 BC in central Italy. He was sent to Rome where he realised that his talent lay with poetry rather than with politics. His first published work was 'Amores', a collection of short love poems. He was expelled in A.D. 8 by Emperor Augustus for an unknown reason and went to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he died in AD 17. 
 
Mary M. Innes graduated from Glasgow and Oxford Universities and subsequently taught in the universities of Belfast and Aberdeen, before spending some twenty years proving to schoolgirls that classical languages can and should be enjoyed.

The most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)

Ovid was born in 43 BC in central Italy. He was sent to Rome where he realised that his talent lay with poetry rather than with politics. His first published work was 'Amores', a collection of short love poems. He was expelled in A.D. 8 by Emperor Augustus for an unknown reason and went to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he died in AD 17. 
 
Mary M. Innes graduated from Glasgow and Oxford Universities and subsequently taught in the universities of Belfast and Aberdeen, before spending some twenty years proving to schoolgirls that classical languages can and should be enjoyed.

Ovid drew on Greek mythology, Latin folklore and legend from ever further afield to create a series of  narrative poems, ingeniously linked by the common theme of transformation. Here a chaotic universe is subdued into harmonious order: animals turn to stone; men and women become trees and stars. Ovid himself transformed the art of storytelling, infusing these stories with new life through his subtley, humour and understanding of human nature, and elegantly tailoring tone and pace to fit a variety of subjects. The result is a lasting treasure-house of myth and legend.

The Serpent's Teeth

One of 20 Penguin Epics published to celebreate Penguin Classics' 60th Anniversary

Publius Ovidus Naso was born in 43 BC in central Italy. He was sent to Rome where he realised that his talent lay with poetry rather than with politics. His first published work was 'Amores', a collection of short love poems. However he was expelled in AD 8 by Emperor Augustus for an unknown reason. He went to Tomis on the Black Sea where he died in AD 17.

In a world of gods and monsters, nothing is as it seems. 
 
When a deadly serpent's teeth are sown in the ground, warriors spring from the bloody soil. Only a great man can tame them and fulfil his destiny. Far away, Medusa, snakes writhing in her hair, meets her nemesis; the princess Andromeda is chained to a rock; people are transformed into owls, frogs, even mountains; a boy falls tragically in love with his own reflection. 
 
Enter a universe where love is cruel, men are destroyed by the gods and treachery is paid for in blood ...

Ovid

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