Λογοτεχνία

A sweeping history of Athens, telling the three-thousand-year story of the birthplace of Western civilization, from Runciman Award winner Bruce Clark 'A stunning retrospect and beautifully written overview of one of the world's greatest cities' Paul Cartledge'Courageously grand in scale yet sensitive to the details that make Athens' extraordinary history come alive' Sofka Zinovieff'Bruce Clark brings an eye for the quirky, human detail, a pithy turn of phrase, and an affection for his subject honed over many decades' Roderick Beaton'Bruce Clark's enchantingly readable history revealed how little I knew' Literary ReviewDominated by the pillars and pediments of the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to Athena, goddess of wisdom, the ancient Greek city of Athens is for many synonymous with civilization itself. Athens: City of Wisdom tells the tale of a city that occupies a unique place in the cultural memory of the West. Each of the book's twenty-one chapters focuses on a critical 'moment' in the city's long history, from the reforms of the lawmaker Solon in the sixth century BCE to the travails of early twenty-first-century Athens, as a rapidly expanding city struggles with the legacy of a global economic crisis.

Bruce Clark has a rich and revealing sequence of stories to tell - not only of the familiar golden age of Classical Athens, of the removal from the Acropolis of the Parthenon marbles by agents of the 7th Earl of Elgin in the early nineteenth century, or of the holding of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896; but also of the less feted later years of antiquity, when St Paul preached on the Areopagus and neo Platonists refounded the Academy that Sulla's legions had desecrated. He also delves into Athens' forgotten medieval centuries, unearthing jewels gleaming in the Byzantine twilight, and tales of Christian fortitude and erratic Turkish governance from the four centuries of Ottoman rule that followed. Few places have enjoyed a history so rich in artistic creativity and the making of ideas as Athens; or one so curiously patterned by alternating cycles of turbulence and quietness.

Writing with scholarly rigour and undisguised affection, Bruce Clark brings three thousand years of Athenian history vividly to life.

Μια έκδοση με ποιήματα γνωστών Ελλήνων ποιητών και ποιητριών από το τέλος του 19ου αιώνα έως σήμερα, μεταφρασμένα στα αγγλικά. Στην έκδοση υπάρχει ειδικό τμήμα με ιστορικά και άλλα στοιχεία για κάθε σημείο της Αθήνας που αναφέρεται μέσα στα ποιήματα, δημιουργώντας έτσι έναν "χάρτη", χρήσιμο για κάθε επισκέπτη της πόλης. Επιπλέον η έκδοση συνοδεύεται από βιβλιογραφία και βιογραφικά στοιχεία των ποιητών και ποιητριών. Athens in Poems reveals the glorious palimpsest that is Athens mapping the city one poem at a time from the 1880s to 2010s. Walk through the streetscapes of Athens, reflect on the city’s historical development and see how poetry becomes attentive to the dynamic instability of the urban space. Watch as the city is built with language and create your own imaginative map of Athens. Wander around Athens of the 1880s, imagine the circular Omonia Square of the 1930s, visit the Shooting Range of Kaisariani during the Nazi Occupation and reach the gate of the Polytechnic School in the 1970s. Look at the capital as a huge fish tank in the 1980s, discover the bastion of Kokkinia, get to love the city’s concrete block of flats and pause for a while to have a glass of ouzo at the Athens Railway Station. Have a quick stop at the Perama district just off Pireaus and, at the start ofn a new century, find a chrysalis beneath Acharnon Avenue and voyage in Athens as in an ocean you can call your own. This is a map of Athens you may call your own.

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. Michel is a molecular biologist, a thinker and idealist, a man with no erotic life to speak of and little in the way of human society. Bruno, by contrast, is a libertine, though more in theory than in practice, his endless lust is all too rarely reciprocated. Both are symptomatic members of our atomised society, where religion has given way to shallow 'new age' philosophies and love to meaningless sexual connections. Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) tells the stories of the two brothers, but the real subject of the novel is in its dismantling of contemporary society and its assumptions, in its political incorrectness, and its caustic and penetrating asides on everything from anthropology to the problem pages of girls' magazines. A dissection of modern lives and loves. By turns funny, acid, infuriating, didactic, touching and visceral.

An alternate history first contact adventure set in the early 2000's, pitched as Arrival meets The Three-Body Problem, by video essayist Lindsay Ellis. By the fall of 2007, one well-timed leak revealing that the U.S. government might have engaged in first contact has sent the country into turmoil, and it is all Cora Sabino can do to avoid the whole mess.

The force driving this controversy is Cora's whistleblower father, and even though she hasn't spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government and redirected it to her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father's leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades. To save her own life, she offers her services as an interpreter to a monster, and the monster accepts.

Learning the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to find the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. But in becoming an interpreter, she begins to realize that she has become the voice for a being she cannot ever truly know or understand, and starts to question who she's speaking for and what future she's setting up for all of humanity.

In the Midwestern city of Zenith, the middle-aged estate agent George F. Babbitt appears to have achieved the American dream to its fullest: he is successful at work, comfortably off, exceedingly well fed, has a wife and children, a motor car and a neat house with a neat yard, and is a proud member of all the right clubs - in short, he lacks nothing to be happy. Or does he? As we follow his humdrum daily routine and startling events begin to unfold around him, we discover that all is not well in Babbitt's world: his moral foundations are shaking, and he can't help harbouring rebellious dreams of escape and romance.

A trenchant satire on consumeristic society and an indictment of the fatuous ideals of middle America in the Roaring Twenties, Babbitt - the crowning achievement of Sinclair Lewis, winner of the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature - questions the attractions of materialistic fulfilment, at the same time laying bare the hollowness of social respectability and blind conformism.

A revolution brewing for generations has begun in fire. It will end in blood. The Free Navy - a violent group of Belters in black-market military ships - has crippled the Earth and begun a campaign of piracy and violence among the outer planets.

The colony ships heading for the thousand new worlds on the far side of the alien ring gates are easy prey, and no single navy remains strong enough to protect them. James Holden and his crew know the strengths and weaknesses of this new force better than anyone. Outnumbered and outgunned, the embattled remnants of the old political powers call on the Rocinante for a desperate mission to reach Medina Station at the heart of the gate network.

But the new alliances are as flawed as the old, and the struggle for power has only just begun. As the chaos grows, an alien mystery deepens. Pirate fleets, mutiny and betrayal may be the least of the Rocinante's problems.

And in the uncanny spaces past the ring gates, the choices of a few damaged and desperate people may determine the fate of more than just humanity.

That one came alone, from some place else. He came slowly, following his own path. A white angel with jet-black wings! Kostas Karyotakis is the poet most emblematic of the turbulent interwar period in Greece. Though traditional in form, usually with end-rhyme and regular metres, Karyotakis’ poetry is modern in content, often pessimistic and bitingly satirical. His writing combines reverie with sarcasm, a stifling sense of every­day reality with poignant irony. This is verse that is both piercing and resonant.

Written with Gerald Durrell's usual sharp eye for observing humour in any situation, Beasts in my Belfry will delight fans both old and new. At the age of two I made up my mind quite firmly and unequivocally that the only thing I wanted to do was study animals. Nothing else interested me. This is a charming account of Gerald Durrell's first job in 1945 as a student keeper at Whipsnade Zoo. Over a year, we encounter a typically absurd cast - including Albert the lion, who's a dab hand at ventriloquism, and Teddy the brown bear, with whom the young Durrell sings duets. With notebook and pen in hand, the eager young Durrell observes his co-workers and animal charges alike.