© Adrian Clarke
Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.
The Way to Colonos ruthlessly dramatizes the limits of individual freedom and the agony of facing one’s powerlessness. The book has recently been reissued at what feels like a propitious moment, when modern treatments of Greek myth proliferate, many of them adapting stories about destiny and order for a chaotic and individualistic time.
This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange.
Kay Cicellis
Foreword by Rachel Cusk
A fiery modern retelling of three Greek tragedies, “written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master.” (Rachel Cusk, from the foreword)