Dinner with Persephone - Hardcover

Storace, Patricia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679421343 ISBN 13: 9780679421344

Publisher: Pantheon, 1996

Synopsis

This volume explores the complicated relationship betwee the idea of classical Greece and the messy, Mediterranean reality of a country unsure of its place in the world. Modern Greece is the strangest nation in Europe, insisting on its privileged place as the cradle of democracy, while offering a less-than-perfect form of democracy to its own minorities and its female population. This is the country that turned itself upside down over the adoption of the name of Macedonia by a former Yugoslav republic, as though Alexander the Great's nationality were a matter of extreme contemporary urgency. Patricia Storace begins by telling of her first day in Greece. She brings to bear on modern Greece a deep knowledge of the classics, of the Greek myths and of Greek Christianity. She is the author of Heredity, a book of poems.

About this title

About the Author:

Patricia Storace is a prize-winning poet and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and CondeNast Traveller. Dinner with Persephone is her first prose book.

From the Inside Flap:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679421343
• ISBN 13: 9780679421344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 398