A dizzying, dreamy compendium of ancient stories... Enchanting... The collection aspires to be both a bedside tome that appeals to millennial attention spans and a hunger for cultural canapes elevated to an art form by Schott's Miscellanies, and at the same time a serious contribution to scholarship on ancient narrative. But somehow the stories themselves-in their sheer, buzzing mass-take on a life of their own and spill over this carefully crafted frame. After a period of full immersion, we begin to hear the voices of the tipsy philosopher, the deadpan Spartan, the bored Roman soldier, the misanthrope, the adulterous wife, and to imagine the ancient laughter echoing through these tales as they were read, heard and replayed. The thrill is anything but anodyne.
Victoria Rimell, Times Literary Supplement This long-awaited, astonishingly comprehensive volume represents the culmination of [Hansen's] scholarly explorations over a period of more than 50 years. [The Book of Greek and Roman Folktales, Legends, and Myths] is a work of remarkable depth and scope, the consummate achievement of decades of research and collecting, analyzing, and classifying the literary memorializations of Greek and Roman oral narrative fiction... All the tales are lucidly translated by Hansen himself... This aesthetically pleasing and most welcome publication not only provides an excellent introduction to the multidimensional world of Greek and Roman storytelling, but also constitutes a delightful repository of literary entertainment.
Choice William Hansen ... has extracted from a lifetime of reading seemingly all of ancient literature's most wonderful anecdotes, eerie stories, Aesopian fables, trickster tales and philosophical parables. The resulting anthology is an extraordinarily entertaining bedside book... [T]hese anecdotes aren't just classical, they're classic, as much a part of our culture as Grimm fairy tales or stories from the Bible.
Michael Dirda, Washington Post