New to Anne Carson’s Books? Start Here.
New York Times · LC · trust 28/100
The Canadian poet won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. If you’ve never read any of her work, here’s where to start.
Share full article 4 Anne Carson in 2015 Credit... Pontus Lundahl/TT News Agency, via Associated Press By Ash Wu
Her writing threads a line from Greek antiquity to the present day, and interrogates the treacly nature of desire and the pain that it induces. Carson gives the impression “of someone from another world, either extraterrestrial or ancient,” Sam Anderson wrote in a 2013 New York Times Magazine profile . “Our modern earthly categories are too artificial and simplistic to contain anything like the real truth she is determined to communicate.”
Despite Carson’s inclination toward privacy, she has achieved a kind of celebrity rare among public intellectuals, as Anderson noted. During a performance of her play “Antigonick” for an overflow crowd at N.Y.U., he wrote, the audience reached a consensus: “People kept using the phrase ‘rock concert.’”
If you’ve never read any of Carson’s works, here are five books to start with.
A novel in verse and perhaps her most popular work, “Autobiography of Red” draws upon Carson’s obsession with Greek classics through a retelling of the fragmentary poem “Geryoneis,” by the poet Stesichorus. In the original myth, Geryon is a winged monster Heracles slaughters after stealing his cattle. Carson reimagines him in the present day as a gay teenager with a troubled family life. He falls into a state of deep infatuation with the Greek hero, who in this version is an older boy who eventually breaks his heart. “Carson writes in language any poet would kill for,” Ruth Padel wrote in her review for The New York Times, “sensuous and funny, poignant, musical and tender, brilliantly lighted.”
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