This volume aims to bring to life for the modern reader, the Greek, Roman and Norse myths that are the keystone of Western culture - the stories of gods and heroes that have inspired human creativity from antiquity to the present.

After three years in prison, Shadow has done his time. But as the time until his release ticks away, he can feel a storm brewing. Two days before he gets out, his wife Laura dies in a car crash, in adulterous circumstances. Dazed, Shadow travels home, only to encounter the bizarre Mr Wednesday claiming to be a refugee from a distant war.

An epic tale of Odysseus and his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War forms one of the earliest and greatest works of Western literature. Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon - Odysseus must test his bravery and cunning to the full.

A study of heroism in the myths of the world - an exploration of all the elements common to the great stories that have helped people make sense of their lives from the earliest times. It takes in Greek Apollo, Maori and Jewish rites, the Buddha, Wotan, and the bothers Grimm's Frog-King.

Tells the story of Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his refusal to fight after being humiliated by his leader Agamemnon. But when the Trojan Hector kills Achilles' close friend Patroclus, he storms back into battle to take revenge - although knowing this will ensure his own early death.

Bursting with imaginative power, this story blends fantasy with humour and drama

Ovid's witty and exuberant epic starts with the creation of the world and brings together a series of ingeniously linked Greek and Roman myths and legends in which men and women are transformed, often by love - into flowers, trees, stones and stars.

Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) is rightly regarded as one of the founders of modern anthropology. This volume is the author's own abridgement of his great work, and was first published in 1922. It offers the thesis that man progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.

The 11 tales of the Mabinogion combine Celtic mythology and Arthurian romance. This new translation recreates the storytelling world of medieval Wales and re-invests the tales with the power of performance.

Building on the formula of York Notes, this series introduces students to more sophisticated analysis and wider critical perspectives. This enbables students to appreciate contrasting interpretations of the text and to develop critical thinking. This text covers The Aeneid by Virgil.

Miraculously preserved on clay tablets dating back four thousand years, the poem of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, is the world's oldest epic. The story tells of Gilgamesh's adventures with the wild man Enkidu. This text is translated by Andrew George.

A work first published in 1948 in which Graves argues that the language of poetic myth current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse - some dating from the Old Stone Age.

Suitable for both the serious scholar and the casual inquirer, this title tells the adventures of the important gods and heroes worshipped by the ancient Greeks. Each entry provides a full commentary which examines problems of interpretation in both historical and anthropological terms, and in light of contemporary research.

Composed towards the end of the first millennium of our era, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is a Northern epic and a classic of European literature. In this new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work that is true, line by line, to the original poem.

When Odysseus goes off to fight the Trojan War, his wife Penelope manages to keep over a hundred suitors at bay. When Odysseus comes home, he kills her suitors and - curiously - twelve of her maids. What led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? This book sets out to provide an answer to an ancient mystery.

Percy is a half-blood - the son of a Greek God. He spends his time fighting with swords, battling monsters with friends and generally trying to stay alive. Now Zeus, God of the Sky, thinks Percy has stolen his lightning bolt - and making Zeus angry is a very bad idea. Can Percy find the lightning bolt before a fully-fledged war of the Gods erupts?

The first volume of Joseph Campbell's great work 'The Masks of God', the summation of a lifetime's study in the origins, history and function of myth.

This third volume of Campbell's classic study of world mythologies covers the central myths that still inform the consciousness of the European West.