Liveright

Originating nearly four thousand years ago, Gilgamesh tells the story of a tyrannical king and his wild counterpart, Enkidu, whom the gods spawn to rein in the king's cruel tendencies. Their unlikely friendship leads to adventure, tragedy, and a quest for immortality. This archetypal tale is one of the most compelling and memorable in all of world literature.It's a testament to the story's inherent power that Gilgamesh continues to enthrall readers despite a long line of English translations that have privileged punctiliousness over narrative energy and readability. Now, in the hands of Simon Armitage, poet laureate of the United Kingdom, this profound ancient epic swells and flows in contemporary English with a vitality and immediacy that only a truly poetic rendering can achieve. Grounded in the latest scholarship, (Jacob L. Dahl of Oxford University, an expert in Assyriology, advised Armitage throughout), this version brings the ancient text to new life, offering readers a thrilling

The dangerous belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to "traditional" values is a myth that has long prospered in American politics, playing an especially vicious role in the development of totalitarianism in the West. How did such damaging ideas arise?In Reproductive Wrongs, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold. Ruden traces a sweeping history through her trenchant analysis of seven pieces of literature that, she argues, marked key inflection points across two thousand years. From propagandistic poetry written by Ovid in the early Roman Empire to the biography of an evangelical American "abortion survivor," Ruden lays bare how doctrines of control over women were invented and propagated.Scathing and vital, Reproductive Wrongs unearths the evolution of a right-wing radicalism that endures to this day, when half of the US population is losing access to basi