Metamorphica

Metamorphica takes its cue from Zachary Mason's first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, which reworked scenes from Homer. This time Mason turns to Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Roman poem about bodies and beings changing form. Ovid had already reshaped the old Greek legends roughly seven centuries after Homer, and Mason now reshapes them again, some two thousand years after Ovid.

The book revisits Narcissus, Orpheus, Persephone, Icarus, Midas, Medea and Actaeon, and links them into a loose chain, much as stars form constellations. Ovid himself appears within the narrative. The stories keep the core force of the shape-shifting gods while rewriting how they unfold, so familiar tales gain new angles and layers.

Readers have compared the approach to the work of Borges or Calvino, or even to a machine's reimagining of myth, and the comparison fits a book that is playful, inventive and concerned with how stories are told. Mason treats the myths as parables that stay in motion and remain relevant to the present.