Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

A winged red monster's tender, mythic coming of age

Anne Carson's genre-bending verse novel reimagines the ancient Greek myth of Geryon, the red monster slain by Herakles, as an achingly personal story of a misunderstood boy who happens to have wings. Told through Geryon's own fragmentary autobiography, the book follows him from a difficult childhood with an abusive brother into a passionate, unequal love affair with a charismatic drifter named Herakles, and the long process of piecing himself back together after being left behind. Blending classical scholarship, invented interviews and startlingly modern imagery, it's by turns funny, strange and heartbreaking, a genuinely original meditation on love, otherness and the making of art.