CROSSING THE WINE-DARK SEA: Journeys Through Ancient Literature, non-fiction from the translation giantess

CROSSING THE WINE-DARK SEA: Journeys Through Ancient Literature
EMILY WILSON
Liveright (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: "An enthralling and profoundly relevant book." —Salman Rushdie

"I adored reading these joyful, illuminating, and engrossing journeys through ancient literature." —Madeline Miller

From the most celebrated translator of our time comes a visionary exploration of how translation reshapes and enriches our understanding of the ancient world.

In this sharp and often entertaining tour through antiquity, Emily Wilson—whose renditions of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation’s imagination—explores the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past. Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work.

Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world.

Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classical background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What I expected was more jabbing at Christopher Nolan for his 3.25/4 master's thesis on the subject of "How The Odyssey Reflects the 21st Century's Everlasting Love for Homeric Misogyny." I did not get that. What I did NOT expect was her comparing Aristophanes in translation to Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B in their "WAP" music video by saying "...his linguistic effects depend, like theirs, on the artful manipulation of rhythm and sound in words and imagery."

I seriously doubt her father, eminent Victorianist A.N. Wilson, would approve of his first-born child even knowing what any of that meant...I was, I confess, the mildest bit shocked. (I sat with flycatcher-mouth for five minutes.)

So, well, Author Emily Wilson does not travel by any more conventional a route here, discussing the weird and wonderful (except Lucretius, Satanic forefather of poetical obscurantism *ptooptoo*sign of the horns*) world of ancient imaginations as recorded in their stories than she did when she asked "tell me about a complicated man." And that decision has honestly received far, far more attention that it merited, mostly because it dares to be clear and to express an accurate assessment of the story that follows. I think her honesty in choosing the use of the word "slave" throughout her translation alone gives an excellent reason for the existence of this book.

The ancient world whose literature has made Author Emily's career was so incredibly unlike our own world that it seems to me the term "translation" is too mild, almost dismissive, when applied to the task of explanation and explication it masks. No basic assumptions are shared; no ideas about humanity, about the manner in which the world goes about its work, remains in common. What does remain in common is human nature, human emotions, humanness itself. Language and culture are not the same but the creatures creating them are.

I found the reading experience very illuminating. I will say that someone from the intellectual background, with the education, and leading the professorial life she has, is not going to come across as just folks or someone you'd meet in the canned food aisle of the Walmart. I would be shocked to see her in Walmart, given the scolding she dished out to Nolan for filming his beautiful-looking but brovian story in Western Sahara. Intersectionality is very much on ortholefty lines. I'm not knocking her! I too am more ortholefty than centrist, so yay...but it really shows. Not everyone will like it.

Not everyone should. I want Author Emily's brave new world with its people who are open to seeing the strangeness of the past clearly and honestly and still not Revering, not at all rejecting, its truth, to come to pass. Now I need to read Iliad to see what she does with Achilles and Patroclus.

I have high hopes. Among my higher hopes are that you'll pick up this tendentious work of recontextualization, recentering, and renewal of our human roots.

THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU, an adventure story about books and the people who love them

THE BAD-ASS LIBRARIANS OF TIMBUKTU
JOSHUA HAMMER
Simon & Schuster
$13.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world’s greatest and most brazen smugglers.

In 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants from northwest Africa seized control of most of Mali, including Timbuktu. They imposed Sharia law, chopped off the hands of accused thieves, stoned to death unmarried couples, and threatened to destroy the great manuscripts. As the militants tightened their control over Timbuktu, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali.

Over the past twenty years, journalist Joshua Hammer visited Timbuktu numerous times and is uniquely qualified to tell the story of Haidara’s heroic and ultimately successful effort to outwit Al Qaeda and preserve Mali’s—and the world’s—literary patrimony. Hammer explores the city’s manuscript heritage and offers never-before-reported details about the militants’ march into northwest Africa. But above all, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu is an inspiring account of the victory of art and literature over extremism.

***I WON THIS BOOK IN A LITERARY HUB GIVEAWAY. THANK YOU TO S&S AND LIT HUB!***

My Review: A journalistic telling of a summer-blockbuster level tale...not that that's a bad thing!

What's most exciting in the book is the interaction of Al Qaeda and the resistance. What's least exciting about the whole story is the fact that we need to be told about the awful and hideous actions of the hate-filled anti-intellectuals who are, even as we speak, eviscerating an entire world's millennium of progress so their imaginary friend won't be mad at them.

And then there are the angry anti-intellectual greedy motherfuckers running the US government as an ATM for the world's wealthiest people.

And that, my dears, is 2017 in a nutshell. Books threaten these scumbags. They have to eliminate them somehow, and here in the US they've chosen the modern path of making them irrelevant, while in the old-school climes of Africa they physically destroy them. Same result. The forces of rage are out to stupidify the globe and it looks depressingly like they're succeeding.

But there are people like the brilliant, beautiful-souled Mr. Haidara. There are nooks in cyberspace where learning and passion for words still matter. There will always be a way to prevent the final night from falling.

It's more urgent than ever to remember that #READINGisResistance!