It may be summer, but plenty of readers are heading back to Homer after Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” hit theaters.
Sales of all translations of the roughly 3,000-year-old epic are up 76 percent year-to-date, according to Circana BookScan. Checkouts from e-book lender Libby have risen 217 percent from the same time last year, according to data shared with USA TODAY. Spotify also told USA TODAY that global listens of “The Odyssey” audiobook have climbed more than 300 percent.
Among the editions getting attention is Gareth Hinds’ graphic novel, which is listed among BookScan’s bestsellers. But the biggest surge has gone to Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, which BookScan lists as this year’s top-selling edition.
Wilson’s domestic sales have already passed 1 million copies this year, according to Emmy Wenstrup, a publicist at W.W. Norton. Her publishers said the sales increase started after Nolan’s movie was announced in December 2024.
Library demand has followed. Connor Goodwin, senior manager of public relations at the New York Public Library, said demand for Wilson’s translation is “outpacing others.” In the NYPL system, Wilson’s edition makes up 90 percent of print holds and 57 percent of ebook and audiobook holds.
Nolan cited several translations as inspiration for the film, including Wilson’s, in an interview with Empire Magazine last year. Her translation is also the only published English version by a woman, according to USA TODAY.
Wilson’s edition is known for modern, plain language, including words like “daddy,” “crazy” and “tote bag.” That approach has carried into discussion around Nolan’s film, after the trailer showed Tom Holland’s Telemachus saying “dad.”
Wilson addressed that debate in comments to LADbible: “English – all registers of English, all dialects – is a modern language; authenticity on that level is impossible unless you’re going to compose a script entirely in Homeric Greek – which would be very fun but unlikely to do well at the box office,” Wilson told LADbible.
Her translation has also been praised and criticized as a feminist version of “The Odyssey.” In a 2017 essay for The New Yorker, Wilson wrote that she made some choices so readers would feel Penelope’s grief over her marriage instead of “prettifying or trivializing” it, as she said other editions do.
She also avoids misogynistic labels such as “sluts” and uses “girls” instead in a passage after Odysseus kills Penelope’s suitors and orders Telemachus to kill the female slaves who slept with them.
“Contemporary translators and commentators often present the massacre of these women as if it were quite ordinary, and entirely justified,” Wilson writes in The New Yorker. “The murdered slaves are routinely described in contemporary American English translations as ‘disobedient maids’ and are labelled as ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’ – a level of verbal abuse that finds absolutely no analogue in the Greek.”
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