Synopses & Reviews
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. Suicide is his next idea. Amazingly, this does not happen. Due to the intervention of his friend Theseus, Herakles comes to believe he is not, after all, indelibly stained by his own crimes, nor is his life without value. It remains for the reader to judge this redemptive outcome.
“I think there is no such thing as an innocent landscape,” said Anselm Kiefer, painter of forests grown tall on bones.
Review
"She is one of the few writers writing in English that I would read anything she wrote." Susan Sontag
Review
"Carson applies the habits of classical scholarship, the linguistic rigour, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts, to the trivia of contemporary private life." Sam Andersen, New York Magazine
Review
"Carson applies the habits of classical scholarship, the linguistic rigour, the relentless search for evidence, the jigsaw approach to scattered facts, to the trivia of contemporary private life." Sam Andersen, New York Magazine
About the Author
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, and translator of Greek mythology.