John Wiswell is a disabled author who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His fiction has been translated into 10 languages. He won the 2021 Nebula Award for Best Short Story for "Open House on Haunted Hill," and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "That Story Isn't The Story." He has also been a finalist for the Hugo, World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards.
Wiswell's new novel is Wearing the Lion.
At People magazine he tagged six Greek mythology retellings, including:
Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya DeaneRead about the other entries on the list.
Achilles is one of the great heroes of retellings, both ridiculously popular and ever inconsistent across iterations. Some myths cast himas invincible except for a weak spot on his heel, yet in the most famous work he appears in, Homer’s Iliad, he is so not-invincible that the gods make sure he gets the right armor and shield. He is a figure with a million angles. Most recently, audiences fell in love with Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, a tender gay romance that focused on Achilles and his fellow soldier Patroclus.
If you hunger for another LGBTQ+ take on Achilles, you need Wrath Goddess Sing in your life. It springs from the ancient story of Achilles passing as a woman in the court of King Skyros, and Deane explodes that idea to speculate that Achilles was a trans woman. She is hardly the only queer figure in the era of the Trojan War, but this Achilles has a unique path through the treacherous relationships of kings and warriors.
Also see Mark Skinner's nineteen top Greek myth retellings, Christine Hume's ten top feminist retellings of mythology, and the B&N Reads editors' twenty-four best mythological retellings.
--Marshal Zeringue
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