Homer's epic of return, compiled from six pre-1929 printings including two complete translations, the Doré illustration folio, and the original Ancient Greek text.
Composed and transmitted orally for centuries before being fixed in writing sometime around the 8th century BCE, the Odyssey follows Odysseus's ten-year journey home from the Trojan War -- a voyage past sirens, cyclopes, and the underworld, while his wife Penelope fends off suitors and his son Telemachus comes of age in his absence. It's less a straightforward war epic than the Iliad, and more a story about cunning, endurance, disguise, and the long, uncertain work of returning to a life that has moved on without you. Its influence on Western storytelling is difficult to overstate: the word 'odyssey' itself entered the language as shorthand for any long, eventful journey, and its structure -- a hero's trials on the way home -- became a template writers have returned to for nearly three thousand years.