Men of Winter

by Ted Morrissey

Overview

Hektr Pastrovich, a journalist and poet, travels to the front of a war his country has been fighting for nine years in search of an enigmatic traveler who calls himself the Prince of Ithaka. Along the way, he meets Helena, a beautiful and charismatic woman who becomes a mystery to Hektr as well. Men of Winter is a revisionist work drawing from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, set in early twentieth-century Russia. This edition is revised and expanded from the version of the novel that originally came out in 2010, released by a different publisher.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149413539
Publisher:	Twelve Winters Press
Publication date:	05/29/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	NOOK Book
Pages:	244
File size:	516 KB

About the Author

Ted Morrissey is the author of the novels Men of Winter and An Untimely Frost, the novelette Figures in Blue, and stories and essays in more than twenty journals, including Glimmer Train, PANK, Writers Ask and North American Review. A Ph.D. in English studies, he has also published the monograph The Beowulf Poet and His Real Monsters, recipient of the D. Simon Evans Prize for distinguished scholarship. The father of three adults sons, he lives just north of Springfield, Illinois, with his wife Melissa. Visit at tedmorrissey.com.

Editorial Reviews

Men of Winter is a complex narrative exploring the poignant themes of love, loss, suffering, and hope. The action of the novel unfolds in the midst of a Russian winter, a world of stinging cold and painful shortages, with the threat of imminent battle looming in the background. Ted Morrissey evokes this wartime environment with deceptive ease. The characters reenact the story Odysseus and his wanderings, the Homeric quest providing a subtext for their picaresque journey into the "northcountry."

Author of HousePoems - Dan Guillory

In a novel where the police have gone elsewhere, Ted Morrissey takes us on a wild ride into a wasteland of snow madness. We find ourselves situated under a colorless sky and clearly on the slopes leading toward a jagged edge. There's no escaping the climbing tension. Morrissey hits us here with an avalanche of awareness, giving us every painstaking detail, every nuance. Men of Winter is quite possibly a war story destined to be a cool classic ... a chillingly weird nightmare of death.

Author Straight Outta Compton and Five Days of Bleeding - Ricardo Cortez Cruz

In Men of Winter, Ted Morrissey takes us into a physical landscape and literary territory that recalls the great Russian writers. But make no mistake: this is not merely homage. It is a modern tale--one that explores the frailties of humanness, and the perseverance it takes to maintain dignity.

Author of November 22, 1963 and Misfit - Adam Braver

Intimate in tone, but epic scope, Ted Morrissey's novel captures the otherworldliness of early twentieth-century Russia in prose that is both literary and accessible. Calling equal to mind Tolstoy and Homer, Men of Winter is an engrossing odyssey along the edge of the world in which strange figures emerge, each influencing the narrative trajectory, and then mysteriously ebb back into the wartime ether.

Editor of Slush Pile Magazine - M. R. Branwen