An extraordinary story. The cover copy of Bucak’s collection (of which this is the title story) has this summary: “the Greek god Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialise, and make sense of, generations of war.” A fragmented structure seems a good way of working with mythic material, and this story keeps those ancient gods suitably mighty and strange, while offering a unique empathetic perspective and crucial thread of humanity through a world of ongoing violence. A difficult read at the time of writing.

First published in Guernica, July 2019, and available to read here; collected in The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, W. W. Norton, 2019