Homer wrote The Odyssey somewhere around the 8th century BCE. That is nearly 3,000 years ago, back when the story was passed around out loud before anyone bothered writing it down. So it is a little funny that in 2026 the ancient poem is suddenly flying off shelves at Barnes & Noble, and the reason has nothing to do with a school reading list. It is a movie. Christopher Nolan made an epic version of The Odyssey, put Matt Damon in the lead, and now Americans are buying the book by the truckload.
According to Circana BookScan, print sales of every edition of The Odyssey in the US are up 76% so far this year. That is a huge jump for a title that has been sitting quietly in the classics section for decades. And the wild part is that this started before anyone had even seen the film.
A movie this big pulls everything up with it
Let us start with how enormous the film is, because that explains a lot. Nolan’s Odyssey opened July 17 and pulled in around $264 million worldwide in its first weekend alone. Two weeks in, it had blown past $650 million and was on a clear path to $1 billion. That made it the biggest live-action movie of the year to that point.
The cast is stacked. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, the king of Ithaca trying to get home after the Trojan War. Anne Hathaway is his wife Penelope, and Tom Holland plays their son Telemachus. Zendaya and Lupita Nyong’o are in there too. Nolan shot the whole thing on IMAX 70mm film, which is why theaters like London’s BFI IMAX were sold out through September. When a movie hits that hard, people want more of the story, and the cheapest way to get more is the book it came from.
One translator sold a million copies
Here is my favorite part of this whole thing. There are dozens of English translations of The Odyssey, but one of them is doing most of the heavy lifting: Emily Wilson’s 2017 version. Wilson is a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and she spent five years turning Homeric Greek into plain, punchy modern English.
When she started, she figured a new translation might sell about 1,000 copies if she got lucky. As of early July 2026, her publisher W.W. Norton said her version had crossed one million copies sold in the US across all formats. From a hoped-for thousand to an actual million. That is the kind of thing that happens maybe once in a career.
Why her book specifically? Nolan has said he was inspired by Wilson’s translation, and you can feel it in the movie. She famously translated the Greek word polytropos as “complicated” instead of the usual “wily” or “resourceful.” Small change, big difference. Her Odysseus is smart and quick but also deceptive and messy, a real person instead of a marble statue of a hero. Wilson was not a consultant on the film, but her fingerprints are all over its tone. She told reporters she is just grateful Nolan is “doing his best to get the general public reading again.”
The numbers didn’t wait for opening night
This is the detail that surprised me most. The book boom did not start when the movie came out. It started when the movie was announced. Nolan revealed the project in December 2024, and sales of The Odyssey grew 42% in 2025 compared to 2024, according to Circana BookScan. That was a full year before anyone bought a ticket. People heard “Nolan is making The Odyssey” and went out and grabbed the book to prep.
Then the 76% year-to-date figure landed just before the July 17 opening, meaning the post-premiere numbers are going to be even bigger once they are counted. And it is not only Wilson’s version selling. Penguin Classics’ Robert Fagles translation and Gareth Hinds’s graphic novel adaptation round out the top three. Even academic paperbacks and fancy illustrated hardcovers are moving. Booksellers across the country say they cannot reorder fast enough.
Across the Atlantic it is even more dramatic. In the UK, sales are up around 70% for the year, with nearly 40,000 copies sold. Some metrics put the year-on-year jump as high as 95%. In the single week the film came out, British readers bought almost 8,000 print copies. For context, the UK moved roughly 5,000 copies in all of 2025.
Homer made the Amazon charts for the first time ever
Think about this one for a second. Amazon Charts tracks the most-sold and most-read books each week. Homer, a poet who lived roughly 2,700 years before Amazon existed, just landed on that list for the first time, sitting at No. 7 on the most-sold fiction chart.
Wilson’s edition climbed even higher on individual retailer lists. On July 21, it was ranked No. 3 on Amazon and No. 11 on Barnes & Noble’s bestseller list, sharing space with brand-new thrillers and celebrity memoirs. Her publisher said paperback sales alone jumped nearly 40% over last year. Libraries are reporting waitlists that stretch for months, which is a problem most librarians would happily take. When a 3,000-year-old poem is competing with this summer’s beach reads, something unusual is going on.
People aren’t just reading it. They’re listening.
Not everyone wants to sit down with a 500-page epic poem, and the audio numbers show it. Spotify reported that audiobook listening for The Odyssey jumped more than 500% on July 17, the exact day the film hit theaters. The rise had actually started earlier, climbing more than 240% back in June. After release, Spotify said listens were on track to be up around 680% compared to before.
France went even crazier for the audio version. Daily listening hours there rose more than 752% on Spotify in mid-July versus the previous month. That is people driving to work, doing dishes, and walking the dog while a narrator reads them ancient Greek adventure. Makes sense honestly. The poem was meant to be heard out loud in the first place, so listening might be the most authentic way to take it in.
Searches for “learn Greek” went up 5,000%
Buying the book is one thing. Trying to read it in the original language is a whole other level of commitment, and a bunch of people are doing exactly that. According to Google Trends data cited by language app Preply, UK searches for “learn Greek” shot up 5,000% over two weeks as the film hype peaked. Preply clocked those searches at roughly 6,000 a month, a 550% bump over the month before.
There is a catch that a lot of new learners will run into fast. Homer wrote in Homeric Greek, an old literary dialect that is quite different from the modern Greek people speak in Athens today. So if you learn modern Greek hoping to read the poem, you are learning the wrong version. Over on Reddit, people are already trading tips on tackling ancient Homeric Greek specifically. One expert compared the whole effect to how The Lord of the Rings sent tourists flooding into New Zealand. A great story makes you want to touch every part of the world it came from.
And now there are books about the movie about the book
Publishers are not going to let a moment like this pass. Insight Editions is putting out two tie-in books about how the film was made. The first, Filming the Odyssey: Inside the Making of Christopher Nolan’s Modern Epic, is written by James Mottram with a foreword by Matt Damon himself. It is packed with interviews, set photos, and concept art, and it drops August 25 for $75. The second is an official companion to the screenplay.
There is even a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle called “World of The Odyssey and Other Greek Myths” for people who want to stare at Cyclops and sirens on their coffee table. So the money here is not just going to Homer. It is spreading to translations, graphic novels, audiobooks, making-of hardcovers, and puzzles.
The takeaway
People love to say nobody reads anymore, especially not the hard stuff. Then a filmmaker points a camera at a poem older than the alphabet most of us use, and a million Americans go buy it. Emily Wilson spent five years on a project she thought might sell 1,000 copies, and she is now sitting on a seven-figure bestseller with her name next to a Matt Damon blockbuster. Not a bad payoff for a Penn professor and a blind poet from ancient Greece.
