LATEST SALES & OFFERS: PROMOTIONS
Born in 1933 in Kavalla in Northern Greece, VASSILIS VASSILIKOS grew up mostly in Salonika. After the military coup in 1967, he spent seven years in exile, returning to Greece in 1974. Author of some 120 books, translated into more than twenty foreign languages, Vassilikos is Greece's formost living novelist. His novel, Z, was adapted for film by Costa Gavras, winning the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1969.
Seven long stories by the eminent Greek author (of Z, 1968, among other novels) that depict his contemporary homeland as a kind of politically deranged funhouse in which abstract ideas assume colorful physical form and people's dreams influence and dictate their actions. Both The Almanac of Dreams (about the ultimate alternative newspaper) and History (the account of a cruise whose passengers seem to reenact the history of modern Greece) suffer from coyness and staginess, but in the briefer stories - especially the amusing The Transplant - Vassilikos wrests both high comedy and plangent emotion from the distracted immersion in (and retreat from) real life of the writer simultaneously harried and energized by the difficulty of expression in a world that keeps changing. (Kirkus Reviews)
