Ovid Metamorphosed

Philip Terry asked a number of contemporary writers to take a story from Ovid as their starting point and to set their imaginations free. The results are varied, startling, scary, sexy, endlessly illuminating and suggestive, often changing the shape of the modern short story itself. Contributors include Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, M.J. Fitzgerald, Paul Griffiths, Sunit Namjoshi, Joyce Carol Oates, Michele Roberts, Marina Warner, Paul West and others. The shape-shifting poetry of Ovid's Metamorphoses has fascinated writers and artists from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, Rembrandt to Picasso. This book is haunted by an ancient idea: that a person's true nature is revealed when their physical shape is changed - the wolf-like man becomes a wolf, the obsessive spinner a spider. 256p. ; 20cm Originally published: London: Chatto & Windus, 2000