Natalie Haynes’ new novel about Medusa
I thoroughly enjoyed a live interview taped from the British Library with Natalie Haynes about her new novel Stone Blind, a feminist telling of Medusa. This print interview in the Bookseller is also lively–not surprising with Haynes. Haynes combines an earlier career as a stand up comedian with her academic one as a Cambridge-trained classicist. I haven’t gotten to Stone Blind yet–I intend to–but I wanted to alert all of you who are enjoying the recent renaissance of feminist mythology retellings. This one is assuredly excellent. Haynes’ A Thousand Ships is one of my topmost Trojan War books.
Here are two pull quotes from the interview to peak your interest:
“I do love to take a story that you sort of know and tell you that it hasn’t always been the way you know it to be,” says Natalie Haynes, a self-declared “classics nerd” who has made her career reinventing Greek myths for a modern readership.
I wonder if the energy of her storytelling is a benefit of having done stand-up comedy for over a decade; she knows how to hold the reader’s attention. “I think it’s an unusual combination of knowing Aristotle’s Poetics which tells me how to structure drama in order to keep tension building, and also knowing exactly how patient the late-night audience is at the Comedy Store. Which is not very patient.”
For another of my posts about Natalie Haynes.