Autobiography of red goodreads list

Anne Carson


Born

in Toronto, Ontario, Canada

June 21, 1950


Genre

Poetry, Classics, Nonfiction


Influences

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Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogueAnne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.

Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is an internationally acclaimed writer. Her books include Antigonick, Nox, Decreation, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; Economy of the Unlost; Autobiography of Red, shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the

Autobiography of Red

January 31, 2025
Anne Carson is a genius. The sort of genius where even the most bawdy of jokes feel like the culmination of a semester’s worth of deep research to deliver a dissertation like a punchline. Autobiography of Red is a masterpiece from Carson that, heartbreaking and hilarious in turn, plays with the Classics in a way that can simultaneously make professors cheer and clutch pearls as she reminds us nothing is sacrosanct in the pursuit of experimental art. Autobiography of Red is a stunning balance of serious and silly that lifts a classic tale by its ankles and shakes it to spill insights from its pockets onto the pavement. Not unlike her description of these “fragments” from Stesichoros she is purportedly presenting the reading, it reads as if it had ‘composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat’ as Carson transforms a Greek myth into a modern, queer coming-of-age tale of ‘identity memory eternity.’ Under Carson’s jocular “retelling”—if it can even be called that beyond having several key ingredients—the mythical, winged beast Geryon becomes a modern lovelorn youth with a penchant for photography adrift on the tempestuous seas of his emotions. He reads like an 80s indie film, camera slung around his neck, a tattered volume of German philosophy in his pockets, and headphone blasting the saddest tracks of The Smiths into his ears. A sort of emo composure that screams ‘under the seams runs the pain,’ yet upon his repeated interactions with Herakles it becomes a little less Sixteen Candles, a little more “touch me” as the song goes. It is a story of loss and grief but, because ‘sometimes a journey makes itself necessary,’ it all climbs a strenuous path towards self-discovery and acceptance. While Carson warns ‘if you find this text difficult, you are not alone,’ and there are moments when you may certainly feel a j
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  • Books by Anne Carson

    Autobiography of Red
    by
    4.27 avg rating — 32,864 ratings — published 1998 — 52 editions
    The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos
    by
    4.21 avg rating — 7,486 ratings — published 2001 — 33 editions
    Eros the Bittersweet
    by
    4.46 avg rating — 5,560 ratings — published 1986 — 44 editions
    Glass, Irony and God
    by
    4.32 avg rating — 4,932 ratings — published 1995 — 22 editions
    Nox
    by
    4.37 avg rating — 3,799 ratings — published 2010 — 7 editions
    Plainwater: Essays and Poetry
    by
    4.26 avg rating — 3,408 ratings — published 1995 — 13 editions
    Red Doc>
    by
    4.09 avg rating — 3,349 ratings — published 2013 — 26 editions
    Antigonick
    by
    4.33 avg rating — 3,052 ratings — published 2012 — 15 editions
    An Oresteia
    by
    4.37 avg rating — 2,718 ratings — published 2009 — 9 editions
    Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera
    by
    4.18 avg rating — 2,165 ratings — published 2005 — 17 editions
    Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides
    by
    4.37 avg rating — 1,897 ratings — published -416 — 6 editions
    Men in the Off Hours
    by
    4.08 avg rating — 1,877 ratings — published 2000 — 16 editions
    Short Talks
    by
    4.10 avg rating — 1,773 ratings — published 1992 — 23 editions
    Norma Jeane Baker of Troy
    by
    4.06 avg rating — 1,737 ratings — published 2019 — 9 editions
    Float
    by
    4.34 avg rating — 1,042 ratings — published 2016 — 6 editions
    The Albertine Workout
    by
    4.27 avg rating — 1,034 ratings — published 2014 — 15 editions
    Wrong Norma
    by
    4.21 avg rating — 729 ratings — published 2024 — 5 editions
    The Glass Essay
    by
    4.52 avg rating — 618 rati

    Autobiography of Red Quotes

    “What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”
    ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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    “Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.”
    ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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    “He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.”
    ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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    “When they made love
    Geryon liked to touch in slow succession each of the bones of Herakles' back
    as it arched away from him into who knows what dark dream of its own, running both hands all the way down
    from the base of the neck
    to the end of the spine which he can cause to shiver like a root in the rain.”
    ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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    “A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive.”
    ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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    “They were two superior eels
    at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.”
    ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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    “Depression is one of the unknown modes of being.
    There are no words for a world without a self, seen with impersonal clarity.
    All language can register is the slow return
    to oblivion we call health when imagination automatically recolors the landscape
    and habit blurs perception and language
    takes up its routine flourishes.”
    ― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

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    “Then a miracle occurred in the form of a plate of sandwic

  • Autobiography of red quotes