Books published by Aiora Press

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.

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.

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 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

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.