Ten years after Troy's fall, Odysseus struggles homeward past monsters and gods to the wife and son who still await him.
Books that mention The Odyssey (38)
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot: “And in the Odyssey--that's a beautiful poem--there's a more wonderful giant than Goliath,--Polypheme, who had only one eye in the middle of his forehead; and Ulysses, a little fellow, but very wise and cunning, got a red-hot pine-tree and stuck it into this one eye, and made him roar like a thousand bulls."”
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope: “There were there two odd volumes of Euripides, a Greek Testament, an Odyssey, a duodecimo Pindar, and a miniature Anacreon.”
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: “Thus communed these; while to their lowly dome, The full-fed swine return'd with evening home; Compell'd, reluctant, to the several sties, With din obstreperous, and ungrateful cries. Pope's Odyssey”
Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “But Emile knew the Odyssey and he had not read Telemachus, so he knew nothing of Eucharis.”
Why Read the Classics by Italo Calvino: “Essay 'The Odysseys Within The Odyssey' (primary subject)”
Grant by Ron Chernow: “Grant had plenty of time to read, perusing The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain and reading aloud excerpts from Homer's Odyssey to Julia.”
Poetics by Aristotle: “In composing the Odyssey he did not include all the adventures of Odysseus”
How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom: “from Homer's Odyssey through Dame's Inferno on to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida”
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara: “he had been preparing to shoot The Odyssey and was rereading it and The Iliad, neither of which he had looked at since he was a freshman in college”
Deception by Philip Roth: “You've read the Odyssey.”
Funeral Games by Mary Renault: “Reaching the Odyssey, he came upon Odysseus' visit to the land of shades... 'Achilleus, no man before has been more blessed than you...' So I spoke, and he in turn said to me in answer...”
God Help the Child by Toni Morrison: “Until I was in prison I'd never read The Odyssey or Jane Austen.”
Italo Calvino by Martin McLaughlin: “the preface to The Odyssey (also 1981, but whose origins go back to the mid-1970s)”
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard: “brought the renowned Odysseus and echoes of Homer's Odyssey into the story by suggesting that Rome's real founding father was a man called Romus”
The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault: “a rusty-voiced rhetor declaimed The Odyssey while his boy passed round the plate”
The Other Americans by Laila Lalami: “before confronting a class of bored prep-school kids making their way through The Odyssey”
The Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino: “Subject of the essay "Within the Odyssey," discussing the narrator and the poem's mythic layers”
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin: “Marx suggests they reread "The Odyssey and The Call of the Wild and Call It Courage"; later a scene is described as straight out of The Odyssey”
Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin: “The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, A Christmas Carol, The Lord of the Rings, Honey in the Horn, The Jump-Off Creek: none of those stories is factual.”
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver: “Or sit on the bed with The Odyssey.”
Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea by Emily Wilson: “Translating the Odyssey (essay in the collection about the author's own translation)”
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon: “he started into the first book of The Odyssey, and for a while, I didn’t care that I was poor”
Outline by Rachel Cusk: “You might remember in the Odyssey ... the character of Elpenor, Odysseus's crewmate who falls off the roof of Circe's house”
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver: “"If her father-in-law had actually read The Odyssey"; Scylla and Charybdis discussed at table”
The Republic by Plato: “But in what follows he takes the person of Chryses, and then he does all that he can to make us believe that the speaker is not Homer, but the aged priest himself. And in this double form he has cast the entire narrative of the events which occurred at Troy and in Ithaca and throughout the Odyssey.”
Don Juan by George Gordon Byron: “His reverend tutors had at times a tussle, And for their AEneids, Iliads, and Odysseys, Were forced to make an odd sort! of apology, For Donna Inez dreaded the Mythology.”
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais: “Do you believe, upon your conscience, that Homer, whilst he was a-couching his Iliads and Odysses, had any thought upon those allegories, which Plutarch, Heraclides Ponticus, Eustathius, Cornutus squeezed out of him, and which Politian filched again from them?”
The Satyricon by Petronius: “I asked the hall-porter what pictures were in the middle hall. "The Iliad and the Odyssey," he replied, "and the gladiatorial games given under Laenas."”
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton: “Plutarch saith as much of Homer, for which cause belike Niceratus, in Xenophon, was made by his parents to con Homer's Iliads and Odysseys without book, ut in virum bonum evaderet,”
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser: “In which I have followed all the antique poets historicall: first Homer, who in the persons of Agamemnon and Ulysses hath ensampled a good governour and a vertuous man, the one in his Ilias, the other in his Odysseis:”
The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott: “After the success of Marmion, I felt inclined to exclaim with Ulysses in the Odyssey:”
Waverley by Walter Scott: “He was not, indeed, so luxuriously attended upon this occasion as the heroic travellers in the Odyssey;”
The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler: “I am not very familiar with the writer of the Odyssey (who, by the way, I suspect strongly of having been a clergyman), but he assuredly hit the right nail on the head when he epitomised his typical wise man as knowing "the ways and farings of many men.”
The Pirate by Walter Scott: “Full in the midst the polish'd table shines, And the bright goblets, rich with generous wines; Now each partakes the feast, the wine prepares, Portions the food, and each the portion shares; Nor till the rage of thirst and hunger ceased, To the high host approach'd the sagacious guest. _Odyssey._”
I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki: “As for the use of strangulation as a true form of punishment, according to my research it appears in Book 22 of The Odyssey, in the passage where Telemachus hangs Penelope's twelve maidservants. [auto-translated]”