Along with I, Claudius, The Golden Fleece is considered one of Robert Graves’s most exciting and transporting historical novels. The Golden Fleece was at one time the most sacred religious object of the ancient Greeks, and had been sent away as the result of a power struggle between the Greeks and earlier inhabitants of the Greek peninsula. In this the original quest narrative, Jason leads a voyage of heroes, including his friend Hercules and many others, in his ship the Argo, to recapture the sacred Golden Fleece and bring it home. To do so he must travel across the whole of the ancient world, perform impossible tasks, and undergo betrayals and tragedies beyond comprehension or human endurance.
Poet, translator, memoirist, novelist, classicist Robert Graves stands alone for his ability to bring to modern readers the great stories of the ancient world with all their vividness and gore and power intact. As he has shown in many of his 140 published works, his facility with ancient myths and his understanding of how they still inform our imaginative lives helps make The Golden Fleece feel as fresh and necessary today as it did the first time someone told the story of Jason and the Argonauts some three thousand years ago.
Collected in
The Graves ProjectAnnouncing the Robert Graves Project
Today marks the publication day for Robert Graves and Alan Hodge's The Reader Over Your Shoulder, which grammarian extraordinaire Patricia T. O'Conner, author of Woe is I, calls "the best book on writing ever published." The Reader Over Your Shoulder is not just a writing handbook. It is a witty and engaging treatise on the pleasures and pains of the English language itself, with witty criticisms of Graves's contemporaries, including Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and H. G. Wells.
The Reader Over Your Shoulder is only the first of fourteen works from the eccentric, downright polymathic mind of Robert Graves. An esteemed poet, a bestselling author of the historical novel I, Claudius, Graves wrote also wrote a diverse set of novels, books on mythology, and children's tales. Seven Stories is excited to introduce these works back into the reading public. Check out the Graves books so far scheduled for publication here, and check out the full list of forthcoming titles here.
Robert Graves (1895–1985) was a preeminent English poet, novelist, critic, translator, and scholar of classical mythology. He served in World War I—an experience recounted in his 1929 autobiography, Good-Bye to All That—and later became the first professor of English literature at the University of Cairo. Best remembered today for his acclaimed historical novels about the Roman emperor Claudius, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, his other books include Count Belisarius, Lawrence and the Arabs, They Hanged My Saintly Billy, Homer's Daughter, The Golden Fleece, The Siege and Fall of Troy, Ann at Highwood Hall, The White Goddess, The Hebrew Myths, and Collected Poems. He is also the co-author of The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose.
