By the author of Achilles: A Love Story and American Revolution: A Gay Novel
WAR STORIES: THE TROJAN TRILOGY re-imagines the Trojan War through the eyes of characters who in Home's Iliad are seen but rarely heard:: Chryses the priest of Apollo whose brief appearance sets the entire story of the Iliad in motion, his daughter Chryseis, and Briseis, both Trojan women captured by Greeks, Prince Antilochus, who comes to Troy to seek the love of the unobtainable Achiles, the Greek's greatest hero. And the women of Troy: Hecabe, Queen of Troy, Andromache, wife of the doomed Hector, the mad Cassandra whose prophecies of Troy's fall all ignore, and Helen of Troy herself, over whose possession the great war is fought. WAR STORIES movingly and excitingly recreates the last days of the war, within the framework of these passionate and personal war stories that add an intimate dimension to Homer's epic tale.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
WAR STORIES includes the modified texts of the other two books in the series: ACHILLES: A LOVE STORY and TROJAN WOMEN, and additional text to create WAR STORIES itself. ACHILLES: A LOVE STORY is a gay re-imagining of the Trojan war (and the first modern novel to do so). TROJAN WOMEN tells the story of Chryses, Helen, Cassandra, and the other Trojan women whose lives are so tragically affected by a war fought by men. For those who might want a more focussed and personal narrative of the Trojan War, I have excerpted from WAR STORIES these other two books as separate publications, though they are much changed from their narrative role in WAR STORIES. Eagle-eyed textual comparatists who have had the patience to read all three books might find language in one book that recalls another. This is by design, for it seemed to me to be an interesting experiment to retell the same story, the one that Homer gave me, from a different viewpoint, but each book connected by echoes of another. Yet all have been so often re-written and revised that ACHILLES: A LOVE STORY and TROJAN WOMEN have ended up being quite different as individual books than what they were when they began as part of another.
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