Bank Square Books presents a weekend book signing with Terence Hawkins for the book The Rage of Achilles.
About the Book
About the BookIn The Rage of Achilles, Terence Hawkins recounts the Iliad as a novel and imagines a Trojan War that really happened. Though he adopts Homer's characters, those fabled warriors are no more noble than the grunts they command, exhausted and bitter after ten years of brutal Bronze Age warfare. And however savage the fighting, over all hangs the terrible truth that the objective of combat is not glory, but the enslavement of the defeated.
Told in taut, elegant prose that captures both the Homeric lyric and military grit, The Rage of Achilles is a fast-moving take on literature's foundational epic.
About the Author
Terence Hawkins is an author of idea-driven fiction, humor, book reviews, and essays. His first book, The Rage of Achilles, was described as “moving with the force of a cyclone” by Historical Novels Review. His next, American Neolithic, was named a Year’s Best by Kirkus Reviews, which called it “a towering work of speculative fiction.” Booklist compared his short story collection Turing’s Graveyard—also a Kirkus Year’s Best—to the Twilight Zone. His work has been recognized with an entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
In 2011 he conceived the Yale Writers’ Conference. Over the next four years, he grew it into a three-week event embracing multiple genres and hundreds of participants from every continent but Antarctica. Its faculty included Colm Toibin, Julia Glass, Nicholson Baker, Tom Perrotta, and Colum McCann. He now directs the Company of Writers, offering workshops, editorial services, and manuscript consultations to writers at every stage of their careers.
From 2018 through 2020 he was Prose Editor of the Blue Mountain Review. He now serves as Literary Editor of All Things Tudor: The Magazine. Since 2018, he’s served as a volunteer mentor in Visible Ink, a creative writing program for cancer survivors at Memorial Sloane Kettering in New York, and he also runs pro-bono workshops for writers through the libraries of Bridgeport, Norwalk, and Rocky Hill in Connecticut.
He grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied history at Yale, where he was also publisher of the Yale Daily News. He lives in Connecticut.
"The ancient world feels new again in Terence Hawkins' The Rage of Achilles, which combines a raw, idiomatic retelling of the Iliad with a searching assay of human consciousness. Unique and invigorating."-Louis Bayard, author of The Pale Blue Eye.