It’s All Greek To Me…

 

 

Greek fiction is not something — I’m going out on a limb here —  that I imagine you think about every day. I know I don’t. 

 

I mean, I knew it was there, that there were contemporary brilliant writers, that the Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t the last great literary exports from that gorgeous country whose coasts are lapped by the Agean, Mediterranean and Ionian seas. I even knew that two Greek authors had won the Nobel Prize for Literature (George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, both primarily poets, like Homer. They do poetry good in Greece.) But, when I got and subsequently devoured this book, New Greek Voices, edited and curated by our very own Art and Style Editor Helen Mitsios, who is — duh! — Greek, I realized that I almost never read any of them, because I hadn’t seen them in English.

 

New Greek Voices: The Best Short Fiction From Greece doesn’t disappoint, nor has it over advertised. Anthologized here are 15 extraordinary writers, who tell simple, great short stories in clean and bewitching language. There’s a freshness to their narratives, these stories aren’t the self absorbed, twisted-into-pretzels-of-self-loathing-and-doubt that so many American fiction writers produce. These stories are like modern folktales, in that they instantly transport you to their authentic and magical worlds, and captivate and beguile you with characters that feel so real that when you are finished reading about them, you look around the room to see where they’ve gone. 

 

I loved “On Your Name Day I’ll Be There”, Tefcros Michaelides’ spider’s-web-spinning murder mystery, and Ioanna Bourazopoulou’s “Ideal Flights”, a surrealist piece at the crossroads of science and fantasy fiction, where the author and three other writers at a retreat meet Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French World War II pilot and author of The Little Prince, who has unknowingly time traveled into the future and past his death, oblivious that he’s where, and when, he’s not supposed to be. “Last Year’s Fiancee” by Zyranna Zateli is a standout too. But really they all are.

 

And this is the first time any of these stories and most of these writers have appeared in English.

 

Helen has form with this sort of anthology, having previously edited New Japanese Voices, which introduced Haruki Murakami (and Banana Yoshimoto) to English-speaking readers, and Out of The Blue, a collection of remarkable Icelandic authors

 

New Greek Voices is published by Tiber & Hudson Publishers, a gloriously and perhaps unintentionally river-themed house. The book just came out.