Fiction has the power to take us all around the world in a single well-spent evening–or to conjure up enchanted dream worlds from the depths of our imagination.

The novel as a distinct genre may have arisen with Miguel de Cervantes' imaginative Don Quixote, but humans have told each other fanciful tales since time immemorial. The great Homeric epics Iliad and Odyssey have captivated our imagination ever since they were first passed on in the oral tradition of the ancient Greeks. And so, today’s novelists, like Madeline Miller, Salman Rushdie, and Amitav Ghosh, find themselves in a venerable tradition, often drawing on the myths of their forebears to tell the stories of our present.

“I had known that there was this witch that turned men into pigs.” —Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller has been captivated by the Odyssey ever since her mother read excerpts to her as a bedtime story. As a writer, Miller gets the chance to turn this childhood fascination into her calling, reenvisioning ancient epics for modern audiences. Her fascination with Circe, the first witch in western literature, has encouraged Miller to retell ancient Greek myths from the point of view of women: “Women have been traditionally shut out of the epic,” she argues, “Their lives have been considered not important enough for the epic." The topics of the epic are all traditionally male: warfare, inheritance, vengeance. Miller sought out to give Circe "the epic scope that women are usually denied and let her have this huge playing field like Achilles and Odysseus get.”

“I was beginning to tell the story of how an artist’s personal experience and concerns can be translated and transformed into a work of art.” —Salman Rushdie

When great imaginative minds take hold of the classics, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the mixture can only be exciting–for example Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte, a modern reinvention of Quixote and Sancho Panza’s legendary adventures. Attentive readers might find references to Rushdie’s own life sprinkled throughout the novel, though this would mean to be misled: “We live in a moment where everybody thinks that novels are disguised autobiography,” Rushdie told CHF, “I thought, let’s say something different: Yes, a story can begin in the personal story of the artist, but where it ends up is as a completely different story. And the journey from one to the other is the imaginative act. That’s the act of creation.”

“We live in a world that’s inescapably global today...In fact, that’s what causes us so much fear and often discontent.” —Amitav Ghosh

Gun Island, the latest novel by Amitav Ghosh, will chase its characters all around the world and back again, linking ancient Bengali legends with the urgent crises of today. But it’s the latter that are always on Ghosh’s mind: “My book is just an attempt to do what I feel I’ve always done, which is to respond in a creative way to the realities of our time.” These realities couldn’t be more dire. With billions of people huddled along the coastal regions of the globe, we will have to face the challenges of global warming sooner or later, a fact that will continue haunting us in the future as well. Can the imagination perhaps lay out pathways for a brighter tomorrow?

Header image: Domenico di Michelino, La commedia illumina Firenze