---
title: H of H Playbook
type: Book
date: 2022-07-24
rating: 8
author: Anne Carson
genre:
  - Literature
year: 2021
status: Finished
image: h-of-h-playbook.jpg
tags:
  - book
colorSortKey: [0, 59, 1]
---
 This book is unfiltered Anne Carson: playful and serious, deep and accessible, flippant and reverent. It contains beautiful prose and a legitimate argument: who Heracles is, why we think about him incorrectly, and what our relationship with myth (and heroics) should be (or perhaps not be.) It is a strange artifact (I think the doodles, fun as they were, could have been excised from the affair.) 

I think people are tempted to fall into a trap of defining Anne Carson — is she a translator, or a transliterator, or something different? I don't think it matters very much. She is a storyteller — she is not *updating* or *transforming* stories told for hundreds of years so much as conversing with them, and using them to tell new and in some cases more powerful ones.