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First published in the 1950s to international acclaim, Margarita Liberaki's allegorical novel, The Other Alexander, speaks to the opposing forces inherent in human nature. This exquisite poetic drama reenacts Greek tragedy in its evocation of a country riven by civil war and a family divided against itself. A tyrannical father leads a double life; he has two families and gives the same first names to both sets of children. In an atmosphere of increasing unease and mistrust, the half-siblings meet, love, hate, and betray one another. Embroiled in absurdity, Liberaki's characters must confront their doubles, as individual and collective identity is called into question in this tale of psychological and political haunting. Hailed by Albert Camus as true poetry, Liberaki's sharp, riveting prose, with its echoes of Kafka, consolidates her place in European literature. Con¬sidered one of Greece's most distinctive voices, Margarita Liberaki is essential reading.

The essence of Pythagoras' teachings is contained in the Golden Verses, seventy-one verses as guidelines on how to live. Pythagoras wrote nothing down during the course of his life, not even the theorem attributed to him. And yet his knowledge and wisdom changed the world, and have survived through the ages to benefit us today.

Generally recognized as one of the foremost Greek prose writers of the modern period, Alexandros Papadiamandis holds a special place in the history of modern Greek letters, but also in the heart of the ordinary Greek reader. Fey Folk is characteristic of Papadiamandis's work.

Greek folk tales descend from Aesop and Greek antiquity, as well as medieval storytelling in the pivotal south-east Mediterranean world that linked Christianity, Islam and Byzantium. These tales, told by folk narrators throughout Greek-speaking regions up to our times, are wondrous, whimsical stories about doughty youths and frightful monsters, resourceful maidens and animals gifted with human speech. The tales weave substantive motifs, characters, and forms into a rich tapestry capturing the temperament and ethos of the Greek folk psyche. ?The folk tales included in this volume were collected in the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. They were found in Greek-speaking lands, including Asia Minor and Cyprus. A few have been borrowed from traditions beyond Greece, while some have come down to us from antiquity, including Aesop-like fables with speaking animal characters.

Smyrna, September 1922: A young Anatolian Greek is taken prisoner at the end of the Greek-Turkish war and marched off into the interior. He recounts his escape and heart-stopping journey through the familiar landscape of his lost homeland, where his ability to pass as a Muslim Turk reveals the common culture shared by the different communities of the crumbling Ottoman empire. A classic tale of survival in a time of nationalist conflict, A Prisoner of War's Story is a beautifully crafted and pithy narrative. Affirming the common humanity of peoples, it earns its place among Europe's finest anti-war literature of the post-world war I period.

The Greek folk songs "Dimotika Tragoudia in Greek" are songs of the Greek countryside, from island towns to mountain villages. They have been passed down from generation to generation in a centuries-long oral tradition, lasting until the present. They are songs of every aspect of old Greek life: from love songs and ballads, to laments for the dead, to songs of travel and brigands. Written down at the start of the nineteenth century, they are the first works of modern Greek poetry, playing a crucial role in forming the country's modern language and literature. Still known and sung today, they are the Homer of modern Greece. This new translation brings the songs to an English readership for the first time in over a century, capturing the lyricism of the Greek in modern English verse. Foreword by A.E. Stallings, American poet and translator.

It has been called the "age of revolution". The white heat of it came in the decades either side of the year 1800. But it lasted a full century: from the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the great national "unifications" of Germany and Italy during the 1860s. Right in the middle of this long "age of revolution" and, as it turns out, the pivotal point within it, comes the Greek Revolution that broke out in the spring of 1821. Historians have been slow to recognise the key role of the Greek uprising in 1821, and the international recognition of Greece as a sovereign, independent state nine years later, in 1830, in this process that did so much to shape the geopolitics of the European continent, and indeed of much of the world. This little book sets out to explain what happened during these nine years to bring about such far-reaching (and surely unanticipated) consequences, and why the full significance of these events is only now coming to be appreciated, two hundred years later.

?Great historical events are never anonymous -- they sweep anyone in their path into the fray. Kevin Danaher, a foreign correspondent in Moscow, will discover exactly that, as he queues at the city's central post office one morning in 1989, waiting to send a fax to his newspaper in New York. How could he know that the beautiful East German woman standing in front of him was the means chosen by fate to throw him onto the stage of world history? With the Soviet Union collapsing and the Berlin Wall about to fall, this moment of history would change the world, and Kevin's life, forever. Stelios Kouloglou, himself a correspondent in Moscow at the time, blends fact and fiction in this compelling political thriller, as he guides us through the human side of history.

Roïdes' irreverent, witty and delightful novel tells the story of Joan who, according to a popular medieval legend, ascended to the Papal Throne as Pope John VIII. The truth of the legend is of little importance as the book is far more than a historical novel and, in fact, parodies the popular historical romances of the time. In Joan, Roïdes has created one of the most remarkable characters in modern Greek literature and in so doing has assured his place as one of its classic authors.

Derided and maligned more than any other Greek artist for his innovative and, at the time, often incomprehensible modernist experiments, Engonopoulos is today justifiably regarded as one of the most original artists of his generation and as a unique figure in Greek letters. Though he considered himself first a painter and only afterwards a poet, his poetry is widely read and admired, with many critical studies of his work appearing in recent years and with a growing recognition of its value and of its creative use of the Greek tradition and language. He enriched post-war Greek poetry with a host of poetic expressions, figures and images that have come to constitute part of the Greek poetic consciousness. In both his painting and poetry, he created a peculiarly Greek surrealism, a blending of the Dionysian and Apollonian, though always in keeping with basic surrealist tenets and, as such, his work is an important and original contribution not only to Modern Greek art and poetry but also to modern art and poetry worldwide.

This collection retells the myths behind common words and expressions in English, bringing to life the heroes, monsters and gods whose deeds and battles have left a hidden mark on our language. The stories in this book feature well-known figures such as Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Hercules, Achilles, the Amazons, Medusa and the Minotaur.

This illustrated history of paper invites children to jump aboard a paper boat that travels from China to Samarkand, Mexico to Paris, and many stops in between to see how paper was created.

A man is seized from his afternoon drink at the Cafe Sport by two agents of the Regime-though what exactly he is suspected of we do not know, and neither, apparently, does he. Part thriller and part political satire, The Flaw is the best-known work of Antonis Samarakis and has been translated into more than thirty languages.

The book gathers the best of a thousand years of philosophy, history and literature, in a compilation of writing spanning from 800 BC to 200 AD. With selections from the five major schools of Greek thought-the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics-it offers guidance for a life well lived.

A wealthy count on his deathbed, his libertine nephew, an upstanding young clerk, and a scheming notary who stops at nothing to protect his daughter make The Notary an iconic tale of suspense and intrigue, love and murder.

Collected here are the two speeches Elytis gave on his acceptance of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature, which are still strikingly relevant today. He addresses a hypertrophic and atrophic Europe in moral chaos, with as many coexisting values as languages.

Often compared during his lifetime to T.S. Eliot, whose work he translated and introduced to Greece, George Seferis is noted for his spare, laconic, dense and allusive verse in the Modernist idiom of the first half of the twentieth century. At once intensely Greek and a cosmopolitan of his time (he was a career-diplomat as well as a poet), Seferis better than any other writer expresses the dilemma experienced by his countrymen then and now: how to be at once Greek and modern. The translations that make up this volume are the fruit of more than forty years, and many are published here for the first time.

A. Laskaratos' Reflections set out his uncompromising and finely reasoned beliefs. As the essence of his thought they could be read with profit by present-day politicians and teachers, and indeed by everybody with an interest in social and moral questions.

Vrettakos's poems are firmly rooted in the Greek landscape and coloured by the Greek light, yet their themes and sentiment are ecumenical. His garden, his own heart, are but a microcosm of the entire world, of the whole of humanity, and both contain divine messages that the lens of poetry can help us to perceive. Bilingual edition

Vizyenos' story evokes a time when Greeks and Turks could share each other's joys and pains despite the hostile relations between their governments. Listening to the protagonist's life story, the narrator of "Moskov Selim" discovers that this Turk is a kindred spirit, despite the gulf of nationality and religion that separates them.

Rebetika are urban folk songs of Greece, often compared to the American Blues. The book includes four essays discussing the history and characteristics of the Rebetika songs, lyrics of 54 songs in English translation with parallel Greek text.