Category: Reading Greece

📚📚On the occasion of the publication of his new novel "Jacarandas" (Εκδόσεις Εστία, 2024), award-winning writer Foivos Oikonomidis spoke to Reading Greece about the book, the way his writings describe this liminal era, as well as the way literature converses with its surrounding reality.

"I think literature is quite effective in the way it permeates the skin and allows for what’s inside to be revealed in minute detail. Through literature one can show how reality takes form inside them. How they perceive it, how they suffer or thrive in it, what their attempts to escape it look like. I think there is no world other than the one in our heads, and that we have a really tough time communicating our worlds to each other. So, literature is a great way to empathize. That is the way, I think, through which it can be revolutionary. When we talk of radically different realities, dystopias or utopias and what not, what we want to know is how it feels to live in such a reality. As long as we emphasize on the human experience, literature can describe anything".

🎊Congratulations to "Marilena Laskaridis" Chair of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam and Associate Professor in Film and Literary Studies of Leiden University, Maria Boletsi, whose "Specters of Cavafy" (University of Michigan Press) was selected by the board of European Society of Modern Greek Studies as the winner of the prize for the best published monograph in 2024.

📚To learn more about the book, have a look at Reading Greece's BOOK OF THE MONTH: "Specters of Cavafy" by Maria Boletsi

📚📚In July's BOOK OF THE MONTH, Reading Greece presents "Hydra in Winter", a travel memoir by Shelley Dark.

"When Shelley Dark lands solo on the Greek island of Hydra for two weeks in the dead of winter, she’s not chasing sunny beaches. She’s hunting a pirate—her husband’s great-great-grandfather and Australia’s first Greek convict. Armed with an umbrella, a cashmere scarf, and zero Greek skills, Shelley is ready to conquer the archives. But Hydra has other ideas: fresh seafood, exhilarating hikes, cats, donkeys, and warm, eccentric locals. What starts as a frantic quest soon reveals that the real treasures are the ones you weren’t looking for".