Essays & Culture

First published English translation of the landmark 1840 utopian novel. Radical in its day, this landmark utopian 1840 novel traces the journey of fictional British Lord Clarisdall to the exotic island nation of Icaria. To Clarisdell's amazement, devoid of competition or property, Icaria flourishes, triumphing over the social evils of 19th-century capitalism.

Albert Camus's lively journals from his eventful visits to the United States and South America in the 1940s, available again in a new translation. In March 1946, the young Albert Camus crossed from Le Havre to New York. Though he was virtually unknown to American audiences at the time, all that was about to change-The Stranger, his first book translated into English, would soon make him a literary star. By 1949, when he set out on a tour of South America, Camus was an international celebrity. Camus's journals offer an intimate glimpse into his daily life during these eventful years and showcase his thinking at its most personal-a form of observational writing that the French call choses vues (things seen). Camus's journals from these travels record his impressions, frustrations, joys, and longings. Here are his unguarded first impressions of his surroundings and his encounters with publishers, critics, and members of the New York intelligentsia. Long unavailable in English, the journals have now been expertly retranslated by Ryan Bloom, with a new introduction by Alice Kaplan. Bloom's translation captures the informal, sketch-like quality of Camus's observations-by turns ironic, bitter, cutting, and melancholy-and the quick notes he must have taken after exhausting days of travel and lecturing. Bloom and Kaplan's notes and annotations allow readers to walk beside the existentialist thinker as he experiences changes in his own life and the world around him, all in his inimitable style.

When the dust settled and the blood dried after the Battle of Plataea, Greeks might have thought that their freedom was secured. But before the corpse of the Great King's general was cold, Athens and Sparta began to bicker over dividing up the spoils. After an autumn of victory, it's a long cold winter among the burned cities and destroyed shrines of Greece, and a hungry spring. And when Arimnestos goes to sea to cruise the Persian-held coasts, he finds that Persia is still not beaten... and that old alliances are now fraying. Is the impossible true? Would the Spartans rather see Athens destroyed than Persia defeated? And who will save the cities of Ionia from the Great King's wrath?It's the spring of 478BCE, and the Long War isn't over yet.

In the 1970s I was teaching in Athens and came across the account by Lord Hunt, of Everest fame, of his 1963 traverse of the Pindos mountains with a mixed party of Greek and English youngsters. I decided that I would try to retrace his itinerary and my route became the backbone of the first edition of this guide in 1986. Since then I have added descriptions of most of the interesting mainland massifs so that the book became a general guide to mountain trekking in Greece. At the time of the last revision I acquired a colleague, Michael Cullen, who was born and grew up in Greece and founded its first ever trekking company. This time we decided to change the format of the guide quite radically, ditching almost everything in favour of a single route that runs pretty much the length of the country from the northern frontier with Albania to the southernmost reaches of the Peloponnese. We have accordingly also changed the title to The Peloponnese and Pindos Way, in the hope that this will give the book a clearer focus and identity and help to attract walkers to come and sample the real charms and beauties of Greece's mountains. If you are in any doubt, there is no better taster than the blog of Jane and Alan Laurie (http://greekhiking.com) describing their epic 2014 walk from the Prespa Lakes on the Albanian-Greek border to their home in the southern Peloponnese, most of it following a route identical with or very close to ours. And keep an eye on our websites, www.thepindosway.com and www.thepeloponneseway.com, for additional photographs and various extra snippets and bits of information which we will add as time goes by.

Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome is a book for all readers who want to know more about the literature that underpins Western civilization. Chistopher Pelling and Maria Wyke provide a vibrant and distinctive introduction to twelve of the greatest authors from ancient Greece and Rome, writers whose voices still resonate strongly across the centuries: Homer, Sappho, Herodotus, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal and Tacitus. To what vital ideas do these authors give voice? And why are we so often drawn to what they say even in modern times? Twelve Voices investigates these tantalizing questions, showing how these great figures from classical antiquity still address some of our most fundamental concerns in the world today (of war and courage, dictatorship and democracy, empire, immigration, city life, art, madness, irrationality, and religious commitment), and express some of our most personal sentiments (about family and friendship, desire and separation, grief and happiness). These twelve classical voices can sound both compellingly familiar and startlingly alien to the twenty-first century reader. Yet they remain suggestive and inspiring, despite being rooted in their own times and places, and have profoundly affected the lives of those prepared to listen to them right up to the present day.

It was a massive, yet little-known landmark in modern history: in 1923, after a long war over the future of the Ottoman world, nearly two million citizens of Turkey or Greece were moved across the Aegean, expelled from their homes because they were the 'wrong' religion. Orthodox Christians were deported from Turkey to Greece, Muslims from Greece to Turkey. At the time, world statesmen hailed the transfer as a solution to the problem of minorities who could not co-exist. Both governments saw the exchange as a chance to create societies where a single culture prevailed. But how did the people who crossed the Aegean feel about this exercise in ethnic engineering? Bruce Clark's fascinating account of these turbulent events draws on new archival research in Greece and Turkey, and interviews with some of the surviving refugees, allowing them to speak for themselves for the first time.

Its name means 'centre of the world', and since the dawn of history the Mediterranean Sea has formed the shared horizon of innumerable cultures. Here, history has blurred with legend. The glittering surface of the sea conceals the remnants of lost civilisations, wrecked treasure ships and the bones of long-drowned sailors, traders and modern refugees. Of the many cities that dot this ancient coastline, Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch are among the oldest and most intriguing. All are beautifully situated, and for layers of history and cultural riches they are rivalled only by their sister cities of Rome, Istanbul and Jerusalem. Yet their fates have been remarkably different. Once major power centres, all five have declined into relative obscurity. Nevertheless, their entwined history takes in Alexander the Great, Nebuchadnezzar, Archimedes and the Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman conquests, and their greatness still lingers for those who seek it out. To bring these mysterious lost capitals to life, historian Katherine Pangonis sets out on a voyage from the dawn of civilisation on the Lebanese coast to a modern-day Turkey wracked by the devastation of the 2023 earthquake. Combining on the ground research with spellbinding storytelling skills, here is a revelatory new story of the Mediterranean, and a powerful reflection on the sometimes fleeting glory of empires.

Lamentation practices can empower the potentiality to defy patriarchal orders ruling everyday life. Always a collective process, lamentation inscribes loss and vulnerability by tending bridges towards the world of the dead and the more-than-human. Gestures such as singing or breathing, gathering, and performances that exceed rationality can inspire a renewed approach to life and death, rural and urban. After all, amidst ongoing processes of extinction, how to mourn a queer activist, a Roma father, a burnt forest, an exiled body, and a ship sunken in the Mediterranean? How to experience loss not as something individual, but within an expanded continuum of pain? How to explore emotions beyond the private sphere? Through case studies and narrations, in different times and geographies surrounding the Aegean Sea, this book amplifies the echoes of collective tears to invigorate contemporary mourning practices that claim public space by grief, rage, and affect.

With Varying Degrees of Success he completes a trilogy of memoirs which describe his life from birth in 1935 to the present day, and together form a remarkable autobiography. He describes the highs and lows of being a professional creative writer in several different genres, his extensive travels around the world, and the hope and desire of writers to make a significant and positive impression on their readers and audiences.