Weight

Weight is a novel by the British writer Jeanette Winterson, published in 2005 as part of a series in which different writers retold classical myths. Her subject is Atlas, condemned by the gods to hold the world up for ever, and her version keeps his own account of what that means.

The book alternates between Atlas and Heracles: the one who cannot put his burden down and the one who can, but whose labours have also been assigned to him. Heracles offers to hold the world for a while, and what follows is an argument between two kinds of freedom, with Winterson folding in her own commentary and a passage about the beginning of the universe written as science.

Winterson writes the myth as a short, spare book that keeps to two figures and their situation. It is one of the volumes in the commissioned series of retellings, each by a different writer, and it is usually read as one of the more personal of them, partly because it takes sides with Atlas.