Using Homer's epic tales as inspiration, this book offers teachers session plans and storytelling tips to facilitate philosophical discussions with children aged 9-14.

Imagine a one-stop shop stacked to the rafters with everything you could ever want to tap into young people's natural curiosity and get them thinking deeply. Well, this is it! Edited by professional philosopher Peter Worley from The Philosophy Shop and with a foreword by Ian Gilbert, this book is jam-packed with ideas, stimuli, thought experiments, activities, short stories, pictures and questions to get young people thinking philosophically. Primarily aimed at teachers to use as a stimuli for philosophical enquiries in the classroom or even as starter activities to get them thinking from the off, it can also be used by parents for some great family thinking or indeed anyone fed up of being told what to think (or urged not to think) and who wants a real neurological workout. The proceeds of the book are going towards The Philosophy Foundation charity.

A BRILLIANT AND BEGUILING REIMAGINING OF ONE OF OUR GREATEST MYTHS BY A GIFTED YOUNG WRITER 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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017 SHORTLISTED FOR THE LONDON HELLENIC PRIZE 2017 WINNER OF THE PRIX MÉDITERRANÉE 2018 From the award-winning, best-selling writer: a deeply moving tale of a father and son’s transformative journey in reading – and reliving – Homer’s epic masterpiece.

In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul... François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus—a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years—resulted in his banishment... and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn’s struggles to write two of his own books—a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father—that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

Since their composition almost 3,000 years ago the Homeric epics have lost none of their power to grip audiences and fire the imagination: with their stories of life and death, love and loss, war and peace they continue to speak to us at the deepest level about who we are across the span of generations. That being said, the world of Homer is in many ways distant from that in which we live today, with fundamental differences not only in language, social order, and religion, but in basic assumptions about the world and human nature. This volume offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to ancient Greek culture through the lens of Book One of the Odyssey, covering all of these aspects and more in a comprehensive Introduction designed to orient students in their studies of Greek literature and history. The full Greek text is included alongside a facing English translation which aims to reproduce as far as feasible the word order and sound play of the Greek original and is supplemented by a Glossary of Technical Terms and a full vocabulary keyed to the specific ways that words are used in Odyssey I. At the heart of the volume is a full-length line-by-line commentary, the first in English since the 1980s and updated to bring the latest scholarship to bear on the text: focusing on philological and linguistic issues, its close engagement with the original Greek yields insights that will be of use to scholars and advanced students as well as to those coming to the text for the first time.

A brilliant, exhilarating debut novel that retells The Odyssey during the 1965 Watts Riots—like nothing you’ve ever read before It’s August 1965 and Los Angeles is scorching. Americo Monk, a street-haunting aficionado of graffiti, is frantically trying to return home to the makeshift harbor community (assembled from old shipping containers) where he lives with his girlfriend, Karmann. But this is during the Watts Riots, and although his status as a chronicler of all things underground garners him free passage through the territories fiercely controlled by gangs, his trek is nevertheless diverted. Embarking on an exhilarating, dangerous, and at times paranormal journey, Monk crosses paths with a dizzying array of representatives from Los Angeles subcultures, including Chinese gangsters, graffiti bombers, witches, the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, and others. Graffiti Palace is the story of a city transmogrified by the upsurge of its citizens, and Monk is our tour guide, cataloging and preserving the communities that, though surreptitious and unseen, nevertheless formed the backbone of 1960s Los Angeles. With an astounding generosity of imagery and imagination, Graffiti Palace heralds the birth of a major voice in fiction. A. G. Lombardo sees the writings on our walls, and with Graffiti Palace he has provided an allegorical paean to a city in revolt.