Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

In fierce, textured voices, the women of Ovid's Metamorphoses claim their stories and challenge the power of myth.

A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Lit Hub

“Provocative reinterpretations of some very old stories . . . [Nina MacLaughlin] sets herself apart is by focusing on female characters, many of them less well known to a contemporary audience . . . MacLaughlin succeeds in making these stories fresh and distinct by allowing her protagonists to speak in their own voices. Vital, vivid, and angry.” —Kirkus (starred review)

I am the home of this story. After thousands of years of other people’s tellings, of all these different bridges, of words gotten wrong, I’ll tell it myself.

Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid’s narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature.

Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.

“More than thirty women from Ovid’s Metamorphoses . . . reclaim their stories in this stirring collection of vignettes. The women of MacLaughlin’s retelling drink kombucha, dabble in oxycodone, wear jeans and sneakers, and call the King of Thebes ‘this asshole jock.’ Above all, they both suffer and find strength at the hands of lascivious men and wrathful gods.” —The New Yorker

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