H of H Playbook

Literature by Anne Carson

Illustrated by Anne Carson H of H Playbook is an explosion of thought, in drawings and language, about a Greek tragedy called Herakles by the 5th-century BC poet Euripides. In myth Herakles is an embodiment of manly violence who returns home after years of making war on enemies and monsters (his famous “Labors of Herakles”) to find he cannot adapt himself to a life of peacetime domesticity. He goes berserk and murders his whole family.…
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The Trojan Women

Here is a new comic-book version of Euripides’s classic The Trojan Women, which follows the fates of Hekabe, Andromache, and Kassandra after Troy has been sacked and all its men killed. This collaboration between the visual artist Rosanna Bruno and the poet and classicist Anne Carson attempts to give a genuine representation of how human beings are affected by warfare. Therefore, all the characters take the form of animals (except Kassandra, whose mind is in another world).…
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Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

Poetry by Anne Carson

Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a meditation on the destabilizing and destructive power of beauty, drawing together Helen of Troy and Marilyn Monroe, twin avatars of female fascination separated by millennia but united in mythopoeic force. Norma Jeane Baker was staged in the spring of 2019 at The Shed’s Griffin Theater in New York, starring actor Ben Whishaw and soprano Renée Fleming and directed by Katie Mitchell. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.…
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Bakkhai

Theater by Anne Carson

Anne Carson writes, “Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics. The Bakkhai is his most subversive play, telling the story of a man who cannot admit he would rather live in the skin of a woman, and a god who seems to combine all sexualities into a single ruinous demand for adoration.…
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Antigonick

Fiction by Anne Carson

Translated from the Greek by Anne Carson

Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her seminal work. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author, “Dear Antigone.” 
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The Albertine Workout

Poetry by Anne Carson

The Albertine Workout contains fifty-nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson’s research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust’s Á la recherche du temps perdu.
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Nox

Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of “Poem 101” by Catallus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry, but arrives as a fascinating and unique physical object. Carson pasted old letters, family photos, collages and sketches on pages.…
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Glass, Irony, And God

Poetry by Anne Carson

Anne Carson’s poetry––characterized by various reviewers as “short talks,” “essays,” or “verse narratives”––combines the confessional and the critical in a voice all her own. Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson in Glass, Irony and God weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style. This collection includes “The Glass Essay,” a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson’s reading of the Brontë sisters, “Book of Isaiah,” which evokes the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism, and “The Fall of Rome,” about her trip to “find” Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of terrible alienation there.…
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Antigonick

Fiction by Anne Carson

Translated from the Greek by Anne Carson

Anne Carson has published translations of the ancient Greek poets Sappho, Simonides, Aiskhylos, Sophokles and Euripides. Antigonick is her seminal work. This paperback edition includes a new preface by the author, “Dear Antigone.” 
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by Inger Christensen

Translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied

With a contribution by Anne Carson

It is the masterwork by Danish poet Inger Christensen (“a true singer of the syllables,” said C. D. Wright), often cited as a Nobel contender and one of Europe’s most revered poets. On its publication in 1969, it took Denmark by storm, winning critical praise and becoming a huge popular favorite. Translated into many languages, it won international acclaim and is now a classic of modern Scandinavian poetry. it is both a collection of poems and a single poetic epic, forming a philosophical statement on the nature of language, perception, and reality.…
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What do you get when you cross Euripides’ classic tragedy, the artistic stylings of Rosanna Bruno, and the poetic touch of Anne Carson? This book! Here’s what we know: Troy has been ravaged. Everyone is depicted as an animal (except Kassandra, who is another planet, which actually makes complete sense when you think about it). Need I say more?
Lithub
There’s no other writer that can present such demands on a feather pillow for the reader, fuse erudition with insights so fluidly, and naturalize unorthodoxy in a manner preserving stylistic originality with timeless thought.
Rain Taxi
In her classical translations, Carson has pursued what T. S. Eliot called “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.”
—Will Harrison, BOMB
This little grenade of a book is difficult to categorize. It’s a performance piece and a treatise on war and beauty, reality and fakery, bombshell and bombing—with ancient Greek etymology lessons woven in to show us how the small and everyday becomes epic, and vice versa. Marilyn Monroe (neé Norma Jeane Baker) is fused here with Helen of Troy, and elements of both milieus—Homer and Hollywood—populate the narrative. It’s easy to imagine the blunt beauty of Carson’s language being spoken and sung on stage.
—Barbara Engel, Booklist
Carson at her best: arresting, exact, at once surprising and unsurprised. She depends on Euripides throughout, but pushes him further than he was prepared to go.
—Jeff Dolven, Public Books
This book fuses poetry, fun Greek history lexicon lessons, Helen, and Marilyn. ‘War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t.//Both carry wounds.’ Delicious couplets. There are dancers who have internalized the music to such a high vibration that they no longer fit into a strict categorization for what they do. They weave with the music in an ancient alien way. Anne Carson brings intergalactic musical moves to the written page. ‘Hermione it’s me, hello hello hello hello hello.’ I dare you to get to that line and not ache. How does an artist write this way? Brilliance and cherries light her stage.
—Young Eun Yook, Literati Bookstore
People who don’t read poetry read Anne Carson.
—Deborah Landau
She reaches past the contemporary moment to craft her unique and universal voice, one that is both as ancient as Sappho and intimidatingly modern.
Washington Square News
For two decades her work has moved–phrase by phrase, line by line, project by improbable project–in directions that a human brain would never naturally move. The approach has won her awards, accolades, and an electric reputation in the literary world.
—Sam Anderson, The New York Times Magazine
She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote.
—Susan Sontag
Anne Carson is, for me, the most exciting poet writing in English today.
—Michael Ondaatje
A striking book.
—Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
Maybe her best…totally recherché and weirdly clear, lingered over and neatly boxed. Precious in the word’s best sense.
—Ben Ratliff, The New York Times Book Review
Anne Carson is a daring, learned, unsettling writer.
—Susan Sontag
In Carson, a single sentence can transcend the entire operation.
—Blake Butler, Vice Magazine
[Antigonick] is both riveting and humorous. Bianca Stone’s illustrations are immediate and visceral, and Robert Currie’s overall book design has elegance and strength.
The Globe & Mail [UK]
It is a cry of grief posed in question form, emphatic, handwritten, excessive and abbreviated and, in this sense, a measured scream that gives us some sense of who or what lives on when it is all too late.
—Judith Butler, Public Books
A beautiful, bewildering book, wondrous and a bit scary to behold, that gives a reader much to think about without making it clear how she should feel.
Slate
Antigonick is as much a re-telling as it is a testament to the importance of Antigone in Western art, of re-tellings, and of refiguring narrative.
Critical Mob
One of the best designed books of the year and a unique reading experience.
Suicide Girls
Anne Carson’s is among the most inventive, astringent sensibilities in modern letters.
—George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement
This is where Carson’s work is best staged: in the uncanny gateway between the temporal and the timeless; in the nick between the world of powerboats and the sublime, terrifying realm of the dead and the still lively gods.
New Statesman
Her poetry is light, swift, and beautiful.
The New Yorker
Carson’s poetry convinces…irrepressibly modern and provoking.
The Oxonian Review
It captures, too, the rift between our everyday efforts to keep ourselves busy, and infinite tragedy: that raw nick between Tuesday and death.
The Guardian
Anne Carson’s blunt Antigonick has arrived at the right cultural moment, if not for poetry than for grief.
The New Inquiry
Antigonick plays extensively with the conventions of narrative form, translation, and the physical presentation of literature.
The Rumpus
Carson has perfectly captured Antigone’s moral fervour and her almost erotic desire for death.
The Guardian
Carson is an exceptionally rhythmic writer.
The Independent
Ms. Carson does more than just update the language and quicken the pacing–she rewrites the play, mines its subtleties, its absurdity and its strangely comic timing and manages to produce a unique text out of a story that goes back much further than the fifth century B.C. when Sophokles wrote his version.
—Michael H. Miller, The New York Observer
An assemblage of words and images so artfully arranged that they make us reconsider not only what poetry can do and should do but even what a book is… Nox will change the way you read.
—Andrew Ervin, The Believer
Carson has made an extraordinary object, like the phoenix’s egg, and has supplied us with the sublime logic to understand everything inside of it as provisional, sketched, and partial: it is an edifice built on botched attempts.
—Dan Chiasson, The New York Review of Books
True, this book — which you can read in less than an hour but will take a life to absorb — takes risks, gambles with exposure… Nox reminds us that where we cannot understand, we can still love.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
What a book.
The New Republic
Nox is interactive, beautiful, and its presentation lends meaning to its contents.
The New Inquiry
A moving document, a rapt exploration of a few more or less deconstructive ideas, a marvelous object of manufacture, a long trip through a short poem by Catullus, and a minor, memorable occurrence in the career of a major writer… Poetry of the most welcome kind: a work you can admire and interpret.
London Review of Books
This most desolate and solitary of elegies is a work of salvage.
The Nation
Carson daringly resists the idea that one cannot think one’s way into another’s muteness and pursues an intimacy occasioned both by necessity and desperation… Stunning in the eloquence of its ambivalence.
Boston Review
Nox is poetic: Its language sings and stings… Carson is less interested in line breaks and stanzas than in creating a collage of texts to mimic the unwieldly and disjointed experience of mourning.
—Adam Wilson, Time Out New York
[Anne Carson] applies the habits of classical scholarship, the linguistic rigor, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts, to the trivia of contemporary private life.
—Sam Anderson, New York Magazine
Anne Carson’s shape-shifting powers are epic.
—Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair
She faces the voids that many of us prefer to turn away from, and this gives her work a rare urgency.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Reading Anne Carson is to experience a euphonious, mystical sort of perplexity.
—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
Here, from the muse of paradox, from Eros the Bittersweet, are poems that shuttle and veer between Hebraism and Hellenism, serendipity and the full blown sequence, the wry and the wondrous, autobiography and the story of the race.
—Robert Fagles
…breathtaking, evidence of visionary publishing at a moment when the book business is increasingly cynical.
Publishers Weekly
Carson has… created an individual form and style for narrative verse… Seldom has Pound’s injunction ‘Make It New’ been so spectacularly obeyed.
New York Review of Books
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