Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Poised between myth and time, Philip Brady's TO BANQUET WITH THE ETHIOPIANS: A MEMOIR OF LIFE BEFORE THE ALPHABET is a sprawling, genre-defying verse epic, an audacious masterpiece of wit and erudition that blends Homer's discovery of the alphabet with a man's return from near death and a boy's struggle to see the adult world through the prism of an ancient epic.