Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and editor. Her books include the novels The Mere Wife, Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings, and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard, she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is the coeditor of Unnatural Creatures. Her stories have been short-listed for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of Beowulf was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
"Maria Dahvana Headley's decision to make Beoulf a bro puts his
macho bluster in a whole new light." --Andrea Kannapell, The New
York Times "Beowulf is an ancient tale of men battling monsters,
but Headley has made it wholly modern, with language as piercing
and relevant as Kendrick Lamar's Pulitzer Prize-winning album
'DAMN.' With scintillating inversions and her use of au courant
idiom--the poem begins with the word 'Bro!' and Queen Wealhtheow is
'hashtag: blessed'--Headley asks one to consider not only present
conflicts in light of those of the past, but also the line between
human and inhuman, power and powerlessness, and the very nature of
moral transformation, the 'suspicion that at any moment a person
might shift from hero into howling wretch.'" --Danielle Trussoni,
The New York Times Book Review "[Headley's] narrator's tone is
light and suspenseful, resembling nothing so much as a man telling
a long but compelling story in a bar. That comparison isn't
accidental . . . [Headley's] Beowulf is a tragicomic epic about the
things men do to impress one another. It's as fierce an examination
of masculine weakness as The Mere Wife was of feminine
strength."--Jo Livingstone, The Poetry Foundation
"[The Mere Wife] includes some tantalizing snippets of Beowulf as
translated by Headley. Now we have the full version, and it is
electrifying . . . It is brash and belligerent, lunatic and
invigorating, with passages of sublime poetry punctuated by
obscenities and social-media shorthand." --Ruth Franklin, The New
Yorker "I have a lot of things to say about Maria Dahvana Headley's
new book, Beowulf . . . The first thing I need to tell you is that
you have to read it now. No, I don't care if you've read Beowulf
(the original) before . . . I don't care what you think of when you
think of Beowulf in any of its hundreds of other translations
because this -- this -- version, Headley's version, is an entirely
different thing. It is its own thing." --Jason Sheehan, NPR Books
"The new Beowulf is incredibly exciting from beginning to end!"
--Jason Furman, Harvard University "The new translation of Beowulf
by Maria Dahavana Headley is the best thing I've read all fucking
year" -Mike Drucker, TV Writer and Comedian "Enthralling, scalding
. . . Headley combines newly-wrought ancient kennings with US
street slang and lights up the women in the poem with unusual
sympathy (including Grendel's mother and the dragon). The thousand
years and more since these ferocious hatreds and battles were
recorded dissolve: the griefs and the rage are still all too
present." - Marina Warner, The New Statesman, Best Books of 2020
"Bold . . . Electrifying."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post
"Finally, a Beowulf translation that leaves us feeling 'hashtag:
blessed.'" -Alena Smith, SLATE/Future Tense virtual event "Maria
Dahavana Headley's breathtakingly audacious and idiomatically rich
Beowulf: A New Translation is a breath of iconoclastically fresh
air blowing through the old tale's stuffy mead-hall atmosphere."
-Mike Scroggins, Hyperallergic "Beowulf: A New Translation pulls
Beowulf into the fraught discourse on masculinity in the 21st
century... Healdey's choice of backward-hatterd beer-soaked
vernacular has its origins in the grandstanding language of the
hero as we've always known him -- a beefcake who wants to pull off
such incredible feats that dudes will hype his reputation for
centuries to come." --Miles Klee, MEL Magazine "This new
translation of Beowulf brings the poem to profane, funny,
hot-blooded life . . . Lively and vigorous . . . I've never read a
Beowulf that felt so immediate and so alive." --Constance Grady,
Vox "The author of the crazy-cool Beowulf-inspired novel The Mere
Wife tackles the Old English epic poem with a fierce new feminist
translation that radically recontextualizes the tale."--Barbara
VanDenburgh, USA Today
"Of the four translations I've read, Headley's is the most readable
and engaging. She combines a modern poetry style with some of the
hallmarks of Old English poetry, and the words practically sing off
the page . . . Headley's translation shows why it's vital to have
women and people from diverse backgrounds translate texts."
--Margaret Kingsbury, Buzzfeed "An iconic work of early English
literature comes in for up-to-the-minute treatment . . . From the
very opening of the poem--'Bro!' in the place of the sturdy Saxon
exhortation 'Hwaet'--you know this isn't your grandpappy's version
of Beowulf . . . Headley's language and pacing keep perfect track
with the events she describes . . . [giving] the 3,182-line text
immediacy without surrendering a bit of its grand poetry." --Kirkus
Reviews (starred) "Hooked from the first word . . . Headley's
combination of alliteration, assonance, and consonance makes for
verse that we can't help but tap our feet and bob our heads to."
--Asymptote "Headley brings a directness, intensity, and rhythm to
her translation that I haven't seen before. This is what it must
have felt like to sit in a mead hall and listen to a scop tell the
tale. Other translations may be more scholarly, literal, or true to
the poetic form of the original, but it's been a thousand years
since Beowulf was this accessible or exciting." --Steve Thomas, The
Fantasy Hive "Joy. That is the primary emotion I felt as I was
reading Maria Dahvana Headley's new translation of Beowulf . . . I
cannot recommend this translation more highly. It is accessible to
the reader who has never encountered Beowulf before, yet it
intrigues and challenges those who study the poem professionally."
--WorldOrigins.org
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