Everyone could use a forest of Albunea, a place where dreams, ghosts, owls, oracles and ancestors offer hints about your fate and advice about difficult decisions. In "Lavinia" (Harcourt. $24, 280 ...

In Virgil's poem The Aeneid, a blond maiden named Lavinia whose father is the king of Italy marries the Trojan hero Aeneas. Virgil doesn't give Lavinia any lines, and he scarcely mentions her for the ...

“Oh Lavinia,” says the ghost of a poet to the title character of Ursula K. Le Guin’s new novel, “Lavinia,” “You are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it.” The ghost is Virgil, the great Latin poet ...

Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, is the author, most recently, of "Why Poetry Matters." Ursula K. LE GUIN can’t easily be pegged. Her ample body of work includes science fiction novels and stories, ...

There was a time when every educated person was expected to know The Aeneid. Virgil's epic relates the odyssey of Aeneas, who flees the destruction of Troy with a handful of his people, in search of a ...

Ursula le Guin's Lavinia is a version of the 'Aeneid’ where women rather than warriors take the lead , finds John Garth Virgil famously opens his epic of the foundation of Rome by invoking the muse to ...