Top ten epics

Stephanie Sy-Quia was born in Berkeley, CA, in 1995 and grew up near Paris. She is a freelance broadcaster and writer (specialising in literary criticism) with a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. She is a Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic and has twice been shortlisted for the FT Bodley Head Essay Prize. Her writing has appeared in The FT Weekend Magazine, The Guardian, The TLS, The Economist, and others. She lives in London.

Her first book, Amnion -- "a form of anti- or counter-epic: it is an attempt to honour a fractured family history and give it its due weight," Sy-Quia writes --is published by Granta Poetry.

At the Guardian Sy-Quia tagged ten of her favorite epics, including:

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Iliad is the story of a great victory, which marked the beginning of ancient Greece’s golden age of dominion over the Mediterranean. But how can you write about defeat from the position of already being the dominant power? Tim O’Brien’s collection of autofictional interlinked short stories concerning the Vietnam war does just this. When your nation has lost its authority in the world, one path ahead is to adopt an unreliable narrator, to question the valorisation of war, the meaning of bravery, and the very concept of a hero.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Things They Carried is among Emily Temple's ten books that defined the 1990s, Emily Fridlund's six top books about self-deception, Janine di Giovanni's top ten books of war reportage, The American Scholar editors' eleven best sentences in literature, Simon Mawer's five top war novels, Olen Steinhauer's six favorite books, and is one of Roger “R.J.” Ellory's five favorite human dramas. Melinda L. Pash, author of In the Shadow of the Greatest Generation: The Americans Who Fought the Korean War, says The Things They Carried changed her life.

--Marshal Zeringue