Every once in a while, you run across a person who lives a whole life--and then comes up with a brilliant idea and lives a second. Such a man was my grad school professor, Paul Zolbrod. A Fulbright Scholar, Andrew Mellon Fellow, and winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities twice, this fabulous English professor had become fascinated with Native American literature, especially the Navajo Creation Myth. After he'd long retired, he decided to challenge the long-held prejudice by the gods of literary criticism that oral literature--and even some Indigenous written stories--were inferior to the great written epics and myths of the West. Paul Zolbrod passionately disagreed!!!
This is where I come in. Noticing a raft of posts on Facebook where he was discussing this issue, I invited him to write a book and promised him I'd publish it. At age 90, he agreed. At age 77, I started editing his book.
And a few months ago, the book was published in PDF form for special patrons, and we headed to print -- and at the last moment paused to wait for an image our author really wanted, one we'd spent 15 months trying to acquire. Now, in the first days of 2026, we're done!
Paul Zolbrod's brilliant, eminently readable, occasionally bawdy -- thank the Navajo for some frank discussions of sex and the outrageous behavior of Trickster Coyote for that -- comparison of the most spectacular epic poem in the English language and an intricate, beautiful, poignant Navajo creation story. They have much in common, but they also diverge radically on the value of women and the nature of ... well ... Nature! Oddly, the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 1 does NOT blame Eve for the Fall: it's the theology that comes long after that embellishes a straightforward story and twists it into an anathema against women. In the Navajo story, female Holy People create immense blessings and look over humanity with loving benevolence just as the male Holy People do. Women are valued, not denigrated, and loved, not used. In the biblical version of creation, the male god Yahweh is the sole creator of life and the universe; in the Navajo version, Changing Woman, with no help from any male agency, creates a branch of the Five-Fingered Earth Surface People (that would be us). So you have one supreme deity--male--who holds power to himself alone. And then you have a supreme deity who is female but shares power with other deities, male and female, in harmony.
Both have immense lessons to give us, lessons in triumph and failure, lessons in harmony and balance and beauty, lessons in love, lessons about the quest for and achievement of wholeness and relatedness.
This is a beautiful and powerful book. It is a mythic, literary, and artistic tour de force. Every chapter of Milton, lush with the magical language of England's great master poet, is a joy. Every chapter of the Navajo creation story is a revelation. It is almost a sure thing that you have never heard any of this before.
And it is written with joy. Paul Zolbrod was a rascal, and he writes like the brilliant English professor he was, but tells a story like the rascal he was. And you will carry the wisdom of these tales with you for the rest of your life. And you will never again be able to look at the stars without sighing about what a mess Coyote made of them.
And a few months ago, the book was published in PDF form for special patrons, and we headed to print -- and at the last moment paused to wait for an image our author really wanted, one we'd spent 15 months trying to acquire. Now, in the first days of 2026, we are finally printed and set off to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop. Soon we head to the stores.
So, our task is completed, and what we need now is money for samples, reviews, and wide marketing. If you can help, we would be most grateful.
You can find a description of Paul's book and have a look at the cover at https://bookshop.org/p/books/paradise-revisited-lines-from-john-milton-s-paradise-lost-and-the-navajo-creation-story-paul-geyer-zolbrod-ph-d/a8953e7aaddf3c3e?ean=9780578771311&next=t