DISCOVERIES

Reviewer’s note: Publishers occasionally ask a group of authors to write on a single subject (wedding cakes, the seven deadly sins). Usually the results are stilted, but Canongate’s bright new series on myth is so far an exception. Believing myths are the DNA of literature and must be retold to stay alive, the publisher asked several writers to choose their favorites and create something new from them.

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The Penelopiad

The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus

Margaret Atwood

Canongate: 200 pp., $18

MARGARET ATWOOD, ever drawn to the untold in history and fiction, tells the story of Odysseus’ alarmingly faithful wife (“A stick used to beat other women with�) in Penelope’s words, accompanied by a grisly chorus: the 12 maids (hanged by Odysseus on his return) who kept her suitors at bay in the 20 years he was gone. “No man will ever kill himself for love of me,� says Penelope, who, with her whiny jealousy of her cousin Helen and her continual efforts to make a virtue of plainness, is (it must be said) not all that likable. Despite his reputation as a cheat and a liar, despite his short legs, despite his absence, Odysseus is more appealing. “He told me once that everyone had a hidden door, which was a way into the heart,� Penelope says of her wayward spouse. “[H]e who could master the hearts of men and learn their secrets was well on the way to mastering the Fates....�

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Weight

The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

Jeanette Winterson

Canongate: 152 pp., $18

JEANETTE WINTERSON knew immediately which myth she wanted to retell: the story of Atlas the Titan and how he came to bear the weight of the Kosmos. Atlas lived on a farm on Atlantis, where he tended a garden. His mother gave an apple tree to Hera, wife of Zeus, but his daughters (“They are girls after all�) ate the fruit, so Hera sent the serpent Ladon to guard the tree. After mankind attacked Atlantis, the Titans were banished, but Atlas was spared as long as he bore the universe on his shoulders. In this uncomfortable position, he heard everything: underground rivers, crackling fires, a village girl with a limp carrying water. Temporarily relieved of his burden when Heracles sent him back to the garden to fetch some apples, he returned and took it up again with a grace, even love, that fascinates Winterson: “Of course I wrote it directly out of my own situation. There is no other way.�

An orphan, Winterson weaves the story of her childhood -- an uncertain past, a pull to the future -- into the story of Atlas and his burden. “Let me crawl out from under this world I have made,� she writes. “I write fiction -- so that I can keep telling the story.... The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see.� In this fond retelling, the author gains a small foothold on her own story and glimpses her reasons for writing fiction.

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A Short History

of Myth

Karen Armstrong

Canongate: 160 pp., $18

MYTHS have always served as a “counternarrative,� an antidote to mortality, Karen Armstrong writes in this book-length essay, a kind of companion to the series. Myths are “rooted in the experience of death and the fear of extinction,� “inseparable from ritual,� concerned with “extremity� and the “unknown.� They show us “how we should behave,� and they speak of “another plane,� a “divine realm.� Armstrong walks us through the ages, from the myths of the Paleolithic hunters, through the Neolithic farmers’ rituals to replenish creative energy, through the rise of cities and the separation from nature (“people no longer experienced the sacred as easily as their ancestors�) to the “death of mythology� in the “Great Western Transformation,� when logos and fact replaced myth, or at least chased it into the realm of fiction.

Armstrong likens reading to ritual and fiction to mythology: “If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore,� she writes, “our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.�