The Way to Colonos

A modern Greek classic "written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master." (Rachel Cusk, from the foreword) First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos reworks three plays by Sophocles in a modern-day setting, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone, wheeling her father onto the ferry to Colonos, is a stylish woman in her thirties, disgusted by her father's self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother that may never come to pass. The myth of Philoctetes, the castaway soldier, is reframed as a story of shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II. As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, the first in sixty years, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work--written in English, her second language--offers "shocking insight into the secret lives of young women" and is only now "free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes."