Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
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Autobiography of Red

Author: Anne Carson

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Unabridged: 3 hr 55 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/24/2016


Synopsis

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional recreation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

About Anne Carson

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur "Genius" Award.


Reviews

Goodreads review by s.penkevich on April 01, 2025

Anne Carson is a genius. The sort of genius where even the most bawdy of jokes feel like the culmination of a semester’s worth of deep research to deliver a dissertation like a punchline. Autobiography of Red is a masterpiece from Carson that, heartbreaking and hilarious in turn, plays with the Clas......more

Goodreads review by Lala on January 10, 2025

This was so excellently written, I've spent 6 months trying to find intelligent enough words to do the book justice. Clearly, I'm finally throwing in the towel at the attempt. Just read it. K?......more

Goodreads review by Emma on July 12, 2020

"Who can a monster blame for being red?"......more

Goodreads review by Ed on January 13, 2018

If this is poetry, then I guess I don't really understand what poetry is. If it's not about rhyme, or meter, sound, or the controlled use of precise, flowing, poetic language, then it seems to resemble prose exactly, but with arbitrary line-breaks, which does not preclude it from being a beautiful stor......more

Goodreads review by li.reading on June 05, 2023

Got 30 pages in and immediately went and ordered everything Anne Carson has ever written.......more