Born out of myth and fairytale, in particular the tradition of the wise old wizard mentoring a bumbling apprentice, and told in language echoing Homer, Beowulf, biblical scripture and John Coltrane, among others, The Ironsmith evolves into a surreal Bildungsroman of a self-perceived “monster,” a painfully introverted young man whose obsession with the ancient sport of weightlifting causes him to withdraw into an increasingly delusional world that anachronistically intersects classical Greece, the Middle Ages, the Industrial Age, WWI and II, the tumultuous sixties, and the age of the Internet.