Main content

Lost Cantos of the Ouroboros Caves Expanded Edition

Available Formats:

  • Publisher:
    University of South Carolina Press, 2015
    Note: This book was purchased with support from the Government of Canada's Social Development Partnerships Program - Disability Component.

Details:

  • Author: Schein, Maggie
    Date:
    Created
    2015
    Summary:

    An enticing collection of tales told in the fabulist and metafiction traditions, Lost Cantos of the Ouroboros Caves embraces a cyclical movement of renewal, like the ancient ouroboros motif itself, in which artfully rendered answers always give rise to perplexing new questions. Maggie Schein's stories introduce medicine men, monks, immortals, witches, seekers and souls in various stages of their cycles in and out of lived life, as well as the occasional talking animal, all searching for meaning and for connections to one another through storytelling. Each fable is a meditation on love, death, growth, pain, identity, self, spirit, cruelty, beauty and the natural order, as seen from the perspectives of the primal, the celestial or the spiritual. Rooted in the archetypes of mythology and philosophy, Schein's lost cantos are stories about the events that make up our lives and our deaths. She makes deft use of familiar forms and universal symbols to explore anew through narrative those questions and experiences that have always vexed us about our confounding existence and the speculative possibilities that abound within and beyond the mortal coil. Schein's tales ask us to reconsider what it means to live and to die, to be simultaneously a creature of magic and the mundane, of the extraordinary and the all-too-ordinary. The result is a delicate but potent collection of alluring fables for the modern reader, recalling classical stories and myths of days long past and asking once more the questions that continue to haunt us. This expanded edition adds three new fables not included in the original edition as well as new illustrations for all eleven stories from artist Jonathan Hannah. Limited to 500 numbered copies, the hardcover collector's edition of Lost Cantos of the Ouroboros Caves: Expanded Edition, includes audio CDs of select fables narrated by two-time Grammy Award winner Janis Ian and a colophon page signed by author Maggie Schein, illustrator Jonathan Hannah, and foreword writer Pat Conroy. A native of Atlanta, and now a resident of the South Carolina lowcountry, Maggie Schein was raised on stories. Schein holds a Ph.D. in ethics from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. An admirer of Taoist and Buddhist texts, philosophies, and practices, as well as the works of naturalists and Native American storytellers, Schein brings a wealth of complementary and conflicting perspectives to her imaginative, lyrical fiction. She lives in Beaufort, SC, with her motley menagerie of rescued animals and artist Jonathan Hannah.

    Subject(s): FICTION / General
    Original Publisher: Columbia, University of South Carolina Press
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9781611174731