Greece

This book was begun in 2007 as a short handbook on Greek terrorism based on official accounts. It turned into a multi-year research project, an attempt to disentangle the lies and wishful thinking of Greek urban guerrillas and the people pursuing them. Fluent in ancient and modern Greek, Kiesling watched the 17N appeals trial, interviewed key participants, waded through masses of archival material, and used computer software and painstaking deduction to reconstruct the secret history of the Greek armed revolutionary movement. Kiesling is the author of Diplomacy Lessons: Realism for an Unloved Superpower (Potomac 2006) and numerous articles. He lives in Athens, where he writes on history, archaeology, ancient religion, and politics.

Bernie Gunther returns in the thirteenth book in the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling series, perfect for fans of John le Carre and Robert Harris. 'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILD'Kerr leads us through the facts of history and the vagaries of human nature' TOM HANKS'One of the greatest master story-tellers in English' ALAN FURST1957, Munich. Bernie Gunther's latest move in a string of varied careers sees him working for an insurance company. It makes a kind of sense: both cops and insurance companies have a vested interest in figuring out when people are lying to them, and Bernie has a lifetime of experience to call on. Sent to Athens to investigate a claim from a fellow German for a sunken ship, Bernie takes an instant dislike to the claimant. When he discovers the ship in question once belonged to a Greek Jew deported to Auschwitz, he is convinced the sinking was no accident but an act of vengeance. And so Bernie is once again drawn inexorably back to the dark history of the Second World War, and the deportation of the Jews of Salonika - now Thessaloniki. As Europe prepares to move on to a more united future with Germany as a partner rather than an enemy, at least one person in Greece is ready neither to forgive nor forget. And, deep down, Bernie thinks they may have a point.

Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world. She may be the most beautiful woman ever. This beauty is a curse as much as a blessing, however, as men fight over her wherever she goes, even kidnapping her in order to possess her. She becomes the most hated woman in all of Greece for the war she sparks when she is abducted by Paris, favourite of Aphrodite. But is Helen really to blame? Is she a willful seductress with no care for the consequences of her actions or a mere plaything of the gods? GREAT WOMEN OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY is a series of short books for young and old introducing readers to the ancient world through its heroines. These books aim to bring readers on a journey filled with excitement, drama, death and love, all while focussing on the women that have played such an important role in our history yet are still remembered as mere bystanders.

This is a complex story of flight. A woman tearing herself away from a major love affair is driven by the pain of her decision to take a long journey. She leaves the town of Patras, her friends, the bar she worked at, her self as she knew it and hitch-hikes to Epirus in winter, along deserted roads, catching rides with the men who drive these roads. Yiannena in Epirus leads her eventually to the island of Patmos where the battle to save her life reaches a climax. Feeling she is on the verge of losing her soul she rediscovers herself in the form of a sleeping child.Though hounded by failure, fear and silence, she discovers the true grandeur of love and with it a sense of her own self. Her mind and emotions are honed to such an exceptional degree that the pain she suffers becomes the way to self-realization. Because love, for the strong and the daring, always leads to the most inaccessible and divine parts of our being.

Kesariani, once you were a star; for a moment you shone in the firmament and then, you vanished for ever into the void of history... There's nothing left. Now you're plastering the last traces of gunshots on your forehead, like an old dog licking its wounds, where the scar has healed." Marios Hakkas lived almost all his tragically short life close to the Athenian neighbourhood of Kesariani, in the shadow of Mount Hymettos. Throughout the Nazi Occupation of Greece, this district was the symbol of Greek Resistance and Hakkas' stories are indelibly marked by the blood-stained events of the Kesariani "Skopeftirio" (Shooting-Ground), where at least a thousand Greek Partisans sacrificed their lives. With sharp irony, but also occasional flashes of elegiac lyricism, Hakkas laments the loss of this valiant spirit. Wrathfully, he imagines the once heroic Shooting-Ground being sold out to land-grabbers, interested only in profiteering and money-grubbing shop-owners. The acquisition of a newfangled "elegant toilet" becomes the symbol of this new Kesariani, where disappointed ex-idealists are no longer able to dream or even to remember their recent struggles. However, the last story in the last book records the voice of a single lad, killed while resisting, and this outcry remains vibrantly alive, demanding justice from future generations.

This work of Ritsos, is it a novel with an emphatic question-mark added by the poet himself? Is it a roman fleuve in the sense of the Proust's "Remembrance of things past"? Is it a wild prose-poetic fling in a "sarcastic climate"? Or is it an autobiography of Greece's most human poet, whom Aragon hailed as the "greatest poet of his time"? And what about the strange title? How are the established Orthodox saints, traditionally decorating the panels near the altar, how are they replaced by anonymous human beings? -everyday people from Ritsos' neighbourhood members of his family and simple inhabitants of Monemvasia; unassuming fellow-prisoners on exile islands and a closely-knit band of friends. [...]

This work of Ritsos, is it a novel with an emphatic question-mark added by the poet himself? Is it a roman fleuve in the sense of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past? Is it a wild prose-poetic fling in a "sarcastic climate"? Or is it an autobiography of Greece's most human poet, whom Aragon hailed as the "greatest poet of his time"? And what about the strange title? How are the established Orthodox saints, traditionally decorating the panels near the altar, how are they replaced by anonymous human beings? - everyday people from Ritsos' neighbourhood; members of his large family and simple inhabitants of Monemvasia; unassuming fellow-prisoners on exile islands and a closely-knit band of friends. All these "anonymities" are skillfully counterpointed with the hero - Ion - and Ion's alter ego - Ariostos - and woven into a fascinating tapestry of reminiscences and reflections, vivid memories from childhood and adolescence, speculations on Greece's recent history, confessions bordering on psycho-analytical introspection, and, occasionally, surrealistic dreams. Ritsos' Iconostasis is embellished with an almost Joycean richness of words, including outrageous puns, unprecedented, though ineffably "poetic", erotica and miraculous flights of language. In Part Three, Ritsos adds the finishing touches to his vast mosaic bringing his visionary cycle full circle. A.M.

This work of Ritsos, is it a novel with an emphatic question-mark added by the poet himself? Is it a roman fleuve in the sense of the Proust's "Remembrance of things past"? Is it a wild prose-poetic fling in a "sarcastic climate"? Or is it an autobiography of Greece's most human poet, whom Aragon hailed as the "greatest poet of his time"? And what about the strange title? How are the established Orthodox saints, traditionally decorating the panels near the altar, how are they replaced by anonymous human beings? -everyday people from Ritsos' neighbourhood members of his family and simple inhabitants of Monemvasia; unassuming fellow-prisoners on exile islands and a closely-knit band of friends. [...]

Arta, 1854. The Turkish occupation. Two boys are born on the same night, one a Greek, the other a Turk, and fate makes them milk-siblings. The novel follows their life drawn on the canvas of the region’s unknown history. An entire era is brought to life in a unique way portraying prejudice alongside adventure, action, love, comical and tragic situations. In the shadow of the clock which strikes the Ottoman hours, Greeks, Turks and Jews live side by side. The shadow falls upon two friends, Liondos and Necip, a mysterious murder, grandpa Ismail, the small nation of Greece, the Ottoman Empire, Dogan the fanatic, conflicts, rebellions, everyday life, stone-throwing fights, Ramazan, coffee houses, hamams, the Turkish berde of Karagoz, smugglers, crofters, estate owners, wealth and poverty and the sweetness and bitterness of life. For, there is a place for everything in the imaret of God.

In his superb new volume, Don Schofield deepens into loss of love and language, of history and home. The greatest thing s to leave no mark at all, he affirms, yet longing draws us to moments when nothing matters but the curve / of one body in the hollow of another. The questions Schofield poses Where do the lost words go? and how many // blessings do I need? echo across the distances between lovers, between countries. In Lands Imagination Favors reverberates with such exquisite and ineffable uncertainties. --Michael Waters A stunning collection Don Schofield s poetry, his sensibility, has traveled through two cultures to make itself. As a result, the poems are unusually rich, vibrant with the personal losses, direct in the articulation of the pleasures of the journey. --Dennis Schmitz As the title of one of these poems suggests, a major focus here is traveling Greece, but the modes for doing so are original, highly evocative, at the end profoundly moving. The landscape is chosen to offer color through details that are both recognizable and metaphoric, places that carry a name familiar to those who celebrate the life of the senses but who are also transported to the land of mythology, characters and their anecdotes who inhabit the bright contemporary world but who are haunted by a harsher history. And the persona provides the voice of discovery, failed happiness, and reconciliation that establishes the emotional truth of so much of the poetry. It is a poetry not to be missed by travelers familiar with this Mediterranean world and also by those prepared to explore its new access to an imaginary world beyond. --Edmund Keeley