Overview

From the best-selling author of The Ingenious Language comes a meditation on rebuilding, recovery, and renewal that is also a fascinating portrait of antiquity's most complex and surprisingly modern hero. In times of peace and prosperity, one can turn to Homer to learn valuable life lessons, to experience the thrills and terrors of war, and to read about hair-raising adventures in distant lands. But when things do not go as planned, when we unexpectedly find ourselves at the center of an epoch-defining upheaval, then, writes Andrea Marcolongo, we must look to Virgil's Aeneas for an example of adaptability and resilience. In Marcolongo's fresh, nuanced portrayal, Virgil's Aeneas emerges as a multiform, deeply human hero, striking in his vulnerability and capacity for empathy. His journey of rebirth and rebuilding, from the ruins of Troy to the shores of Italy, teaches us that when all seems lost, with hope, perseverance, and a little bit of luck, we can seek and find new beginnings. ""Marcolongo is today's Montaigne...There is wisdom and grace here to last the ages.""--André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name

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9781609457495

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Praise for The Ingenious Language Andrea Marcolongo's love of Ancient Greek is infectious in this brilliant meditation on language and life. Bookriot [Andrea Marcolongo] shows how languages give us new ways of seeing and understanding the world. The Guardian The Ingenious Language has the potential to change your sense of reality. Refinery29 Anyone who values the study of language will delight in this spirited defense of the effort being worth the reward. Publishers Weekly Andrea Marcolongo is today's Montaigne. She possesses an amazing familiarity with the classics combined with the ease and lightness of those who surf the web. But Montaigne's incandescent injunctions are all there: the humility not just to know but to accept who one is, the courage to love, and finally the joy of steering one's course in this strange voyage called life. There is wisdom and grace here to last the ages. Andre Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name [Andrea Marcolongo's] declaration of love for Ancient Greek does more than celebrate the virtues of its grammar, it shows us modern fools how this language can help us understand ourselves better and live a better life. Le Monde The Ingenious Language is not a grammar text, but a love story with a language and its ability to affect our senses. [ . . . ] Rather than reducing the strangeness of ancient Greek to a list of rules to be memorized, Marcolongo uses it to fascinate us, transforming nine linguistic peculiarities into existential questions. La Stampa The Ingenious Language is an extraordinary, absolutely original book. [ . . . ] A young classics scholar, Marcolongo is driven by an obsession: demonstrating that, with ancient Greek, life is more exciting, colorful, and attractive. Italian Association for Classic Culture Marcolongo writes about ancient Greek in a new, non-academic way. Her aim is to excite our interest for a language that today seems more alive and necessary than ever, because of its ability to 'tell complex things with simple, true, and honest words'. Corriere della Sera The Ingenious Language is a love letter which aims to dispel the dread that surrounds ancient Greek. Marcolongo insists on the current relevance of a language that many consider dead. Rivista Studio

Author Information

Andrea Marcolongo is an Italian journalist, writer, Classics scholar, and former speech writer for Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. The Ingenious Language was a bestseller in Italy and in many of the other dozen countries in which it has been published. She is also the author of The Heroic Measure. She lives in Paris, France. Will Schutt is the author of Westerly (the Yale Series of Younger Poets) and translator, most recently, of Carlo and Renzo Piano's Atlantis: A Journey in Search of Beauty, Andrea Marcolongo's The Ingenious Language, and My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti.

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