The Odyssey Moment: When Bookshops Must Choose Whose Story Matters

By Andy — 2026-07-26 — Literary News

Fanny Howe finished a book. Then she died.

That stark fact sits underneath the literary chatter of mid-July 2026. This Poor Book, published by Graywolf Press in May, was completed just before her death in July 2025. Not as a thematic gesture. Not as metaphor. She simply kept working.

More or less.

According to the Los Angeles Review of Books, Howe "retraced poems from several collections over the last 30 years and reconfigured them into one long, continuous epic." It reads neither as collection nor memoir, though it contains both. The book asks, in form itself, what a creative life looks like when you're running out of time. No answers. Just the question held up to the light.

That same week, Christopher Nolan released a $250 million adaptation of Homer. The Odyssey opened July 17, and nobody could stop talking about it. Critics wrote. TikTok processed. Box offices swelled. Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope—the casting alone became its own conversation.

But Solnit's essay about Homer cut through the noise.

"Classical culture is a lot of things including, literally, rape culture." That's what she led with, examining the Odyssey itself. Not the Nolan film. Not the spectacle. The source. The text that's been handed down as foundational, untouched, sacred.

Actually, that's not quite right.

Solnit wasn't being original. Mary Beard made this argument years ago. The silencing of women doesn't begin with Homer—it begins in Homer, right there in book one when Telemachus tells his mother Penelope to shut up. The tradition of Western literature opens with a man telling a woman her voice has no place in public. After that, the silences compound. They're woven into the fabric. Solnit connected that to everything else: the Tate brothers, contemporary misogyny, the way classical authority covers for contempt.

Two kinds of reading happened that week. Lit Hub covered both. One version celebrates the epic, the journey, the hero. The other asks who gets to speak in the story we've inherited. The magazine didn't choose sides. It just published them alongside each other.

Which is actually the point.

For a used bookshop in Bangkok, this matters more than most places. People come looking for what's "important," what's "canonical," what's lasted. They trust the weight of tradition. But tradition, Solnit reminds us, is packed with deliberate erasure. Penelope sits at home. The Sirens sing. Helen of Troy becomes a prize. These aren't incidental details. They're structural.

So what do we do? Keep reading Homer. Still watch Nolan. But read Solnit too. Read the retellings—Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Pat Barker—where women finally speak their names. Read Howe's final book, where a dying poet refuses to tidy up her own story into something neat and memorial.

The canon isn't wrong to exist. But a book counter should know it's built on silence.