There’s a passage in Cold Calls (2005), the final volume in Christopher Logue’s magnificent and, fittingly, never-completed “account” of the Iliad, in which the British poet describes Ajax and Nestor calling on Achilles:

They find him, with guitar,

Singing of Gilgamesh.

Myth within myth.

Logue weaves in and out of the Iliad taking a bit of this, adding a bit of that—Stalingrad shows up, and so does the space program. In his debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2007, revised 2010), Zachary Mason gives the kaleidoscope another shake. He rearranges elements of the Iliad’s sequel into fragments that can only be understood by reference to Homer’s original, even as he toys with, replaces, and subverts it. In one story, Odysseus discovers Agamemnon’s copy of “a book called the Iliad”: myth within myth. In this Iliad’s introduction, it is explained that the works

attributed to Homer were . . . written by the gods before the Trojan war—these divine books are the archetypes of that war rather than its history . . . . [T]here have been innumerable Trojan wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic . . . . each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.

The Iliad and the Odysseyhave sometimes, through authorial and managerial oversights, become available to their protagonists. Surprisingly this has had no impact on the action or the