Psomi Kai Eleutheria

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "Full of insights, marvelously entertaining . . . haunting and beautifully written." --The New York Review of Books "I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." So begins Patricia Storace's astonishing memoir of her year in Greece. Mixing affection with detachment, rapture with clarity, this American poet perfectly evokes a country delicately balanced between East and West. Whether she is interpreting Hellenic dream books, pop songs, and soap operas, describing breathtakingly beautiful beaches and archaic villages, or braving the crush at a saint's tomb, Storace, winner of the Whiting Award, rewards the reader with informed and sensual insights into Greece's soul. She sees how the country's pride in its past coexists with profound doubts about its place in the modern world. She discovers a world in which past and present engage in a passionate dialogue. Stylish, funny, and erudite, Dinner with Persephone is travel writing elevated to a fine art--and the best book of its kind since Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi. "Splendid. Storace's account of a year in Greece combines past and present, legend and fact, in an unusual and delightful whole. " --Atlantic Monthly

The Glorious Foods of Greece is the magnum opus of Greek cuisine, the first book that takes the reader on a long and fascinating journey beyond the familiar Greece of blue-and-white postcard images and ubiquitous grilled fish and moussaka into the country's many different regions, where local customs and foodways have remaained intact for eons. The journey is both personal and inviting. Diane Kochilas spent nearly a decade crisscrossing Greece's Pristine mountains, mainland, and islands, visiting cooks, bakers, farmers, shepherds, fishermen, artisan producers of cheeses, charcuterie, olives, olive oil, and more, in order to document the country's formidable culinary traditions. The result is a paean to the hitherto uncharted glories of local Greek cooking and regional lore that takes you from mountain villages to urban tables to seaside tavernas and island gardens. In beautiful prose and with more than four hundred unusual recipes -- many of them never before recorded --invites us to a Greece few visitors ever get to see. Along the way she serves up feast after feast of food, history, and culture from a land where the three have been intertwined since time immemorial. In an informed introduction, she sets the historic framework of the cuisine, so that we clearly see the differences among the earthy mountain cookery, the sparse, ingenious island table, and the sophisticated aromaticcooking traditions of the Greeks in diaspora. In each chapter she takes stock of the local pantry and cooking customs. From the olive-laden Peloponnesos, she brings us such unusual dishes as One-Pot Chicken Simmered with Artichokes and served with Tomato-Egg-Lemon Sauce and Vine Leaves Stuffed with Salt Cod. From the Venetian-influenced Ionian islands, she offers up such delights asPastry-Cloaked Pasta from Corfu filled with cheese and charcuterie and delicious Bread Pudding from Ithaca with zabaglione. Her mainland recipes, as well as those that hail from Greece's impenetrable northwestern mountains, offer an enticing array of dozens of delicious savory pies, unusual greens dishes, and succulent meat preparations such as Lamb with Garlic and Cheese Baked in Paper. In Macedonia she documents the complex, perfumed, urbane cuisine that defines that region. In the Aegean islands, she serves up a wonderful repertory of exotic yet simple foods, reminding us how accessible -- and healthful -- is the Greek fegional table. The result is a cookbook unlike any other that has ever been written on Greek cuisine, one that brims with the author's love and knowledge of her subject, a tribute to the vibrant, multifaceted continuum of Greek cooking, both highly informed and ever inviting. The Glorious Foods of Greece is an important work, one that contributes generously to the culinary literature and is sure to become the definitive book of Greek cuisine and culture for future generations of food lovers -- Greek and non-Greek alike.

This book shows how the model of singing poets becomes then an organizing principle for a system of national popular music. It responds to the growing call for the teaching of the textual networks of popular music within the domains of literary and cultural studies.

Putting Greece back on the cultural and political map of the “Long 1960s,” this book traces the dissent and activism of anti-regime students during the dictatorship of the Colonels (1967-74). It explores the cultural as well as ideological protest of Greek student activists, illustrating how these “children of the dictatorship” managed to re-appropriate indigenous folk tradition for their “progressive” purposes and how their transnational exchange molded a particular local protest culture. It examines how the students’ social and political practices became a major source of pressure on the Colonels’ regime, finding its apogee in the three day Polytechnic uprising of November 1973 which laid the foundations for a total reshaping of Greek political culture in the following decades.

Traces the history of the Greek language from the immediately postclassical or Hellenistic period to the present day. In particular, the historical roots of modern Greek internal bilingualism are traced. First published by Hutchinson in 1969, the work has been substantially revised and updated.

One of the most daring feats in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s daring life was the kidnapping of General Kreipe, the German commander in Crete, on April 26, 1944. Abducting a General, now published for the first time in the United States, is Leigh Fermor’s own account of the kidnapping. Written in his inimitable prose, and introduced by the acclaimed Special Operations Executive historian Roderick Bailey, it is a glorious firsthand account of one of the great adventures of the Second World War. Also included in this book are Leigh Fermor’s intelligence reports sent from caves deep within Crete, which bring the immediacy of SOE operations vividly alive, as well as the peril under which the SOE and Resistance were operating, and a guide to the journey that Kreipe took, from the abandonment of his car to the embarkation site, so that the modern visitor to Crete can relive this extraordinary trip.

The book is a detailed historical survey of Greek cinema from its very beginning (1905) until today (2010).