The Odyssey, or, What's in the Horse?

Zachary Mason's book The Lost Books of the Odyssey just came back from the printer and I am beside myself with anticipation to see what people think of this book. It was the winner of our 2nd most recent contest, judged by Carole Maso -- and I remember Carole writing to me about it after the judging was done and saying, "You're really lucky to have found this one." It's a miracle of a book -- for his debut, Zachary Mason has imagined a long-lost ur-text of the Odyssey, with alternate episodes, fragments, retelling and the like of the original, and rendered it in such stunning fashion that Harry Mathews (whom Mason wrote, out of the blue) had this to say:

"“Zachary Mason’s astounding glosses of The Odyssey plunge us into an unforeseeable and hypnotic dimension of fiction. Of the three possible interpretations of the work that he proposes — Homeric stories anciently reproduced by recombining their components, a Theosophist dream of abstract mathematics, and pure illusion (that is, it was all made up by him) — the result is one and the same. This enthralling book is his doing, whether as translator, conjuror, or author. I vote for number three.”

OK, OK, I won't make this a simple press release. I have more to tell. Dig this picture of sculptures that Mason commissioned to enclose review copies sent to five major reviewers -- Harper's, NY Times Book Review, NY Review of Books, New Yorker, and LA Times Book Review. Each review copy, wrapped in white crepe paper written over with gold calligraphy, goes inside a sculpture.

I take no credit for this -- this was Zach's idea -- and one of the smarter and more stylish book campaigns I've seen. Now hopefully it will work, and people will pay attention to this absolutely singular book -- a book I can honestly say (though such a statement is subjective, and there's a disagreement in the very next post) is the most impressive first novel I have ever seen.

Since the originals of these are off to do their business and will be seen by relatively few people, I wanted to show them here. You gotta go a long way these days to try to get a review these days for a small press book! But this book especially is one I hope people really pay attention to.

Go to Mason's Starcherone page to order the book here.