Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction
2 total works
Guy Davenport - regarded by the "New York Times" "one of our most gifted and versatile men of letters" - has produced in this collection of stories a remarkably harmonious synthesis of subjects and forms. Melding history, biography, botany, political theory, geology, and other interests, Davenport creates fictions that are complex but unified, mature, balanced, and resolved.
These eight stories by Guy Davenport are extraordinary. His fiction becomes a historical and linguistic collage, "assemblages," he has said, "of history and necessary fiction". We follow time through Thebes under Spartan rule, the Athens of Diogenes, a Civil War field hospital, Bordeaux, Bologna, and the English countryside in the 20th century. Mixtures of myth and fable, these tales have their origins in Plutarch, Montaigne, The Acts of the Apostles, Theokritos, and the daily newspaper.