Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

jeanette winterson

“When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is ‘I want to tell the story again.’ My work is full of cover versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Heracles takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom, too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere.” -- from Jeanette Winterson’s Foreword to Weight

Genres fictionmythologyfantasyretellingsgreek mythologyliterary fictionliteraturenovelscontemporaryadult

151 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5,2005

This edition

Format: 151 pages, Hardcover
Published: October 5, 2005 by Canongate U.S.
ISBN: 9781841957180
ASIN: 1841957186
Language: English

Characters More characters

Hera (greek Mythology)

Hera (Greek Ἥρα, Hēra) is the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus in the Olympian pantheon of Greek mythology and religion. Her chief function is as the goddess of women and marriage. Her counterpart in the religion of ancient Rome was Juno. The cow, li...
Atlas

In Greek mythology, Atlas (Ancient Greek: Ἄτλας) was the primordial Titan who held up the celestial sphere. He is also the titan of astronomy and navigation. Although associated with various places, he became commonly identified with the Atlas Mountains i...
Heracles

Heracles (Ancient Greek: Ἡρακλῆς, Hēraklēs, from Hēra, "Hera", and kleos, "glory"), was a divine hero in Greek mythology, the son of Zeus and Alcmene, foster son of Amphitryon and great-grandson (and half-brother) of Perseus. He was the greatest of the Gr...

About the author

jeanette winterson

Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.

She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.

Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.