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Zachary Mason's brilliant and beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, reimagines Homer's classic story of the hero Odysseus and his long journey home after the fall of Troy. With brilliant prose, terrific imagination, and dazzling literary skill, Mason creates alternative episodes, fragments, and revisions of Homer's original that taken together open up this classic Greek myth to endless reverberating interpretations.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey is punctuated with great wit, beauty, and playfulness; it is a daring literary page-turner that marks the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.

CLASSIC SF ROMP BY AUTHOR OF RIVERWORLD! When Alan Green's starship crashes on a medieval planet overrun with feudal human societies, he is instantly captured and sold into slavery. Big, handsome, blond and strong, on a planet of short, dark people, Green soon finds himself installed as a gigolo to Duchess Zuni of Tropat, the local duke's voluptuous but bath-needing wife. Lazy, cautious to the point of timidity, he soon finds himself under the thumb of Amra, an Amazon of a wife, a slave like him, who combines beauty, and intelligence with five kids, one of them Green's. With himself as gigolo and Amra, as official lernan of the Duchess Zuni, Green is doing quite well in a precarious position when he hears that another ship from the sky has landed a few thousand miles away, and the two men on board mistaken for "demons" and scheduled for execution. Determined to save his fellow Earthmen from death, and himself from Amra, Green determines to cross the grass sea of Xurdimur and get himself to Estorya in time to stop the execution--and incidentally hitch a ride home to Earth. Thus begins Philip Jose Farmer's The Green Odyssey, which has rightly been called "rollicking science-fiction adventure" ... "uproarious" ... "swashbuckling" ... "sheer fun" ... "and by science fiction critic and by scholar, Sam Moskowitz: "filled with engaging humor." The adventure begins when Alan Green arranges passage on a "wind roller." a sailing vessel of the plains by dazzling the captain with a financial scheme that offers rich profits to overcome his reluctance to help a fugitive. Setting "sale" with the captain, Green thinks he's escaped from his dominating wife -- but he's wrong. Throw in pirates and floating islands and a black cat-goddess with a taste for beer, picked up after shipwreck on one of the wandering Islands of the Xurdimur, and you have the recipe for science-fantasy adventure as irresistible as Riverworld itself. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction hails Green Odyssey as "A picaresque tale or an earthman escaping from captivity on an alien planet; the intricately colorful medieval culture of this planet, the high libido of its women, the mysteries Buried within the sands of the desert over which the hero must flee, and the admixture of rapture and disgust with which the hero treats this venue -- all go to make this novel a model for the flowering of planetary romance from the 1960s on."

Ever wonder what could bring a demon to the gates of heaven?

Aliisza and Kaanyr Vhok have returned from their attempted invasion of Menzoberranzan and turned their sights on Sundabar. But before she can complete a mission in that beseiged city, Aliisza finds herself in the one place a demon would never want to go, no matter how sure she is of her wits and cunning: the very heart of Celestia!

Join everyone's favorite succubus and her half-fiend boyfriend, introduced in the War of the Spider Queen series, in the first installment of their own exciting new trilogy!

What brings a demon to the gates of heaven?

The half-fiend Kaanyr Vhok finally arrives at the destination he has sacrificed so much to achieve--he is in the heart of Celestia with his lover and consort, the succubus Aliisza. Only to find that the House of the Triad is falling apart, and he is bound by a vengeful Aliisza and a renegade angel into trying to save it--not exactly the goal he had in mind.

The second full-length novel in The Empyrean Odyssey, The Fractured Sky continues to follow War of the Spider Queen favorites Aliisza and Kaanyr Vhok as the pair of fiends struggle to escape the heart of a deeply troubled Celestia while bound to a particularly determined angel.

What could bring heaven to the depths of hell?

Aliisza betrayed her lover, her mentor, and her son in order to try to stop the dark plot to kill the goddess Mystra. She failed. Now the goddess is dead, magic is malfunctioning, and Aliisza and her companions are trapped. Her only hope of escape lies is in convincing the angels and demons she just betrayed to trust her and work together--before they kill each other.

The Crystal Mountain is the climax to an epic tale of Realms-shaking events. A must-have for any true Forgotten Realms fan.

Contents:

• 3 - The Odyssey Pattern: Progress and Clarke's Elegaic Humanism - essay by George E. Slusser
• 35 - Six Odysseys - essay by George E. Slusser
• 64 - Biography (The Space Odysseys of Arthur C. Clarke) - essay by George E. Slusser

If the Iliad is the world's greatest war epic, the Odyssey is literature's grandest evocation of an everyman's journey through life. Odysseus' reliance on his wit and wiliness for survival in his encounters with divine and natural forces during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War is at once a timeless human story and an individual test of moral endurance.

In the myths and legends retold here, Fagles has captured the energy and poetry of Homer's original in a bold, contemporary idiom, and given us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox's superb introduction and textual commentary provide insightful background information for the general reader and scholar alike, intensifying the strength of Fagles's translation. This is an Odyssey to delight both the classicist and the general reader, to captivate a new generation of Homer's students.

Since 1961, this Odyssey has sold more than two million copies, and it is the standard translation for three generations of students and poets.

Fitzgerald's supple verse is ideally suited to the story of Odysseus' long journey back to his wife and home after the Trojan War. Homer's tale of love, adventure, food and drink, sensual pleasure, and mortal danger reaches the English-language reader in all its glory.

A lean, fleet-footed translation that recaptures Homer's "nimble gallop" and brings an ancient epic to new life...

The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home.

In this fresh, authoritative version?the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman?this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, this engrossing translation matches the number of lines in the Greek original, thus striding at Homer's sprightly pace and singing with a voice that echoes Homer's music.

Wilson's Odyssey captures the beauty and enchantment of this ancient poem as well as the suspense and drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, from the cunning goddess Athena, whose interventions guide and protect the hero, to the awkward teenage son, Telemachus, who struggles to achieve adulthood and find his father; from the cautious, clever, and miserable Penelope, who somehow keeps clamoring suitors at bay during her husband's long absence, to the "complicated" hero himself, a man of many disguises, many tricks, and many moods, who emerges in this translation as a more fully rounded human being than ever before.

A fascinating introduction provides an informative overview of the Bronze Age milieu that produced the epic, the major themes of the poem, the controversies about its origins, and the unparalleled scope of its impact and influence. Maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, and extensive notes and summaries of each book make this an Odyssey that will be treasured by a new generation of scholars, students, and general readers alike.