The work is heavily Homeric, remote and noble, full of gloomy gray seas and doomy gray mountains, and ribboned with bardlike epithets.

NEWYORKER: The Dragon��s Egg

Imagine a cross between a Homeric rhapsode, chanting one of the epics in front of a roaring fire, and the blues singer Muddy Waters.

NEWYORKER: Chunhyang

With a nifty solder-gun and his small engraving lathe he could make an American typewriter speak 145 different tongues, from Russian to Homeric Greek.

ECONOMIST: Martin Tytell

Jazz and rock critics have likened Mr. Shimabukuro (shee-mah-boo-kuh-roh) to such icons as Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, comparisons now unfurled like Homeric boilerplate wherever his intercontinental tour schedule leads him.

WSJ: His Ukelele Is On Fire | Jake Shimabukuro | Cultural Conversation by Matthew Gurewitsch

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

NEWYORKER: Once Upon a Time

After ruminating on it for almost 15 years, Mr Fowles turned in a work that was full of Shakespearean and Homeric allusion, the story of an English teacher in Greece who falls under the sway of a fabulously wealthy magician, the Magus of the title, and his parallel fantasy universe.

ECONOMIST: John Fowles