Authors Electric

That's my boy there: Ovid. The dullest of all Roman writers, I thought. Two pages of The Metamorphoses could put me to sleep for two nights--and the terrible Penguin translation could knock me out for a week. Samples of my torment: J.J. Howard, 1807: From bodies various form'd, mutative shapes My Muse would sing:--Celestial powers give aid! A.D. Melville, 2009 Of bodies changed to other forms I tell; You Gods who have yourselves wrought every change... Arthur Golding, 1567: Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate, Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)... Iambic pentameters, rhymed and unrhymed...blank verse...prose--I never could get past the opening account of Creation--because I could not feel the once-living presence behind it. And because I had no sense of Latin as a once-living language. What the heck was the fuss about Ovid? Well, one day at Atlanta's Oxford Books, I chanced on a new translation by...

THE GHOST DRUM by Susan Price           Susan Price has been a professional writer since she was 16, and has published 60 books, with Faber, Black, Hodder, Scholastic, OUP and CUP, among others.  She is now self-publishing, and her books are available as downloads from Amazon .           'My story is set (says the cat) in a far-away Czardom, where the winter is a cold half-year of darkness.           In that country the snow falls deep and lies long, lies and freezes until bears can walk on its thick crust of ice. The ice glitters on the snow like white stars in a white sky!... the winter is one long night, and all that long night long the sky-stars glisten in their darkness, and the snow-stars glitter in their whiteness, and between the two there hangs a shivering curtain of cold twilight.’           The cat is the ‘...