Ovid Metamorphosed — Philip Terry

The shape-shifting poetry of Ovid's Metamorphoses has fascinated writers and artists from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, Rembrandt to Picasso. Its eternal freshness is haunted by an ancient idea: that a person's true nature is revealed when their physical shape is changed- the wolf-like man becomes a wolf, the obsessive spinner a spider.For this dazzling collection Philip Terry asked leading writers to take Ovid as a starting point and set their invention free. The results are startling, from Apollo and Phaeton transposed to a Dutch classroom to Diana and Actaeon in the rain of Nova Scotia. We find fables, grotesques and white-coated scientists; sports-cars, swans and shells; and even Ovid himself, high-spirited and unrepentant, speaking to us from beyond the grave.Challenging the very shape of the modern short story, Ovid Metamorphosed is a kaleidoscope of delights, scary, sexy, suggestive and profoundly entertaining.