Lucas Stoffel

The Odyssey by Stephen Fry Book Review: Christopher Nolan's Odyssey hits theaters July 17, 2026, and if you want to walk into that movie with the full emotional architecture of Homer's poem in your head, Stephen Fry's The Odyssey is the retelling to read. I am giving my full review of Homer's original elsewhere on this site. This review is about what Fry does to it, for it, and with it.

This book won the Pulitzer and honestly it deserved all of it. Percival Everett takes Huckleberry Finn, a book most of us read in school, and retells it from Jim's perspective. Except here, his name is James, and he's been code-switching his entire life. Speaking one way around white people, another way when they're not listening. That device, that simple idea, completely transforms the story. Twain wrote Jim as a sidekick. Everett writes him as the smartest person in ever