Author:Philip Terry
The shape-shifting poetry of Ovid's Metamorphoses has fascinated writers and artists from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, Rembrandt to Picasso. Its eternal freshness is haunted by an ancient idea: that a person's true nature is revealed when their physical shape is changed- the wolf-like man becomes a wolf, the obsessive spinner a spider.For this dazzling collection Philip Terry asked leading writers to take Ovid as a starting point and set their invention free. The results are startling, from Apollo and Phaeton transposed to a Dutch classroom to Diana and Actaeon in the rain of Nova Scotia. We find fables, grotesques and white-coated scientists; sports-cars, swans and shells; and even Ovid himself, high-spirited and unrepentant, speaking to us from beyond the grave.Challenging the very shape of the modern short story, Ovid Metamorphosed is a kaleidoscope of delights, scary, sexy, suggestive and profoundly entertaining.
Powerful stories...playful...sexy...frightening.
—— Sunday TimesOvid's winning mix of passion and compassion, sex, and terror, love and grotesquerie - all recreated by the storytellers of Ovid Metamorphosed.
—— IndependentA rare treat of indulgent erudition.
—— Scotland on SundayM R James is quite simply the finest writer of ghost stories ever. They're always set in an academic context, about university chaps who find out very nasty things while they're researching. They uncork the wrong bottle, unearth the wrong papers, dig up the wrong place. . . James was provost of Eton and a fellow of Kings College, and the stories have this wonderful candlelit, academic atmosphere, surrounded by incredible nastiness. Tweedy, but unpleasant
—— Christopher FraylingA master class in creepiness from the Edwardian-era Provost of King's College, Cambridge. James delivers brilliant atmospherics, gnawing disquiet and (above all) horrific denouements created by suggestion rather than ghoulish spectacle
—— Independent'Whistle And I'll Come To You' is one of the best ghost stories that has ever been written... will haunt you to the marrow
—— Daily ExpressBeautifully nuanced stories, realistic snapshots of modern Japan enclosed in a fictional world that is seemingly trivial, but loaded with portent
—— IndependentA really imaginative collection where all the stories are intertwined and mysterious in that Murakami way
—— ObserverMurakami's storytelling inspires intimacy. It's the particular kind of intimacy that can evolve between a reader and a book, unspoken and unexpected, familiar, satisfying, strange.
—— JANE MENDELSOHN , Village VoiceEven in the slipperiest of Mr Murakami's stories, pinpoints of detail flash out warm with life.
—— New York TimesMurakami is one of the best writers around.
—— Time OutMurakami is a true original and yet in many ways he is also Franz Kafka's successor because he seems to have the intelligence to know what Kafka truly was - a comic writer.
—— Sunday Herald