Yorgos Ioannou

The protagonist in each of these stories is a solitary individual, alienated from society, haunted Dy memurira, fascinated by the disgusting, obsessed with the relationship between love and death, and fetishistically attached to certain objects that bear the traces of traumatic experiences. Ioannou brilliantly highlights the discrepancy between intimate acts of sex and violence, and the way people pretend in public that life can be lived withoutphysicality. In "Good Friday Vigil"- his last book of stories before his untimely death in 1985 - Ioannou departs from the conversational tone of his earlier work and develops an intricate style whose wanderings evoke the associative meanderings of the memory.

Yorgos Ioannou's "Refugee Capital: Thessaloniki Chronicles" shines a harsh, ironic, yet compassionate light on his birthplace, the city of Salonica. The human geography and consciousness of which were indelibly marked by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920's. In the prose pieces and essays that make up Refugee Capital their story is told, often through the eyes of an adolescent narrator recreated by a writer at the peak of his powers. Yorgos Ioannou sets out to rescue the enduring from the clutches of the ephemeral, to reconcile the irreconcilable, to harmonize the discordant. So he does. And brings an entire city, and its inhabitants, to life in all their fractious diversity.