Travel Stories of
Greece and the Greek Islands

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A Lone Red Apple l Travelers Tales Greece: True Stories l
The Olive Grove: Travels in Greece l Dinner with Persephone l
A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece l The Summer of My Greek Taverna l
A House in Corfu l The Priest Fainted l This Way to Paradise l

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A Lone Red Apple We're delighted to recommend this book by our friend Aurelia, author of the MagicalJourneys.com Mykonos section and various stories throughout the site. This is a delightful novel that takes the reader on an enchanting, magical journey to the white islands of the Cyclades. Told in a whimsical way, it is one of the most refreshing, original love stories ever about Greece and its immortal gods and goddesses. This novel represents a new genre. Set in modern times in the timeless land of the gods , A Lone Red Apple combines excellent, useful travel information on Greece, Mykonos, Delos, and Greenwich, England, with a captivating love story of a man and a woman from different cultures.

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Travelers Tales Greece: True Stories The land of gods and goddesses, myth and history, the cradle of western civilization, the birthplace of drama and democracy - no country resonates with history like Greece. This book plumbs that rich past and the equally rich present in a dazzling literary journey for travelers and armchair travelers alike. From cuisine ("God as Patissier") to culture ("Sappho's Island") and show the breadth of experience of a place, from the rogue, off-the-track traveler's take to the first-class passenger's impressions. Contributors include Paul Theroux, Patricia Storace, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Caroline Alexander, Emily Hiestand, Donald W. George, and Robert D. Kaplan.

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The Olive Grove: Travels in Greece Katherine Kizilos brings a personal touch to the Greek isles, traveling from Athens to Chrysambela, the Peloponnesian village where her father lived until, at 17, he was put on a plane to Australia to escape the German occupation. She describes the first meeting with Grandmother Katerina, who spent the evening kissing her hand and stroking her hair, and the wide, operatic views overlooking the Corinthian Gulf. Kizilos's trip also takes in Syros, Thíra, Patmos, Ikaria, and Lesbos. She ventures into the netherworld of the border, visiting Thrace despite her relatives' dire predictions, and provides an intimate picture of Greece that is far different from the usual Acropolis-dominated postcard depictions.

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Dinner with Persephone For many, Greece is a land lost in time. It conjures up images of the looming Parthenon with its pillars of marble and the timeless whitewashed buildings of its parched islands glinting against a backdrop of the crystal blue Mediterranean. But ask about contemporary Greece and most people draw a blank. In Dinner with Persephone, poet Patricia Storace does a compelling job of filling in this empty canvas. She conjures a country where history and modernity coexist in often surprising ways, and with the past as an ineluctable backdrop, Storace paints in the everyday details that bring the country and its people vividly to life.

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A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece For many, Greece is a land lost in time. It conjures up images of the looming Parthenon with its pillars of marble and the timeless whitewashed buildings of its parched islands glinting against a backdrop of the crystal blue Mediterranean. But ask about contemporary Greece and most people draw a blank. In Dinner with Persephone, poet Patricia Storace does a compelling job of filling in this empty canvas. She conjures a country where history and modernity coexist in often surprising ways, and with the past as an ineluctable backdrop, Storace paints in the everyday details that bring the country and its people vividly to life.

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The Summer of My Greek Taverna: A Memoir As recorded in the brief summary above, the book follows the author's adventure one summer trying to run a Greek taverna on the Agean island of Patmos. The book recounts how the author set up shop, ran it daily with his dubious Greek partner, and finally discovered what his dream really meant to him. The narrative seems to take place before Patmos become a hot tourist location (before 1990). The book is light reading (probably take 2 hours of reading...after all it is only 199 pages) -- it includes with some folklore about the island (much revolving around St. John's visit in the first century). The recipies printed in the appendix are a nice touch, especially for those wanting to indulge in the culinary experience

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A House in Corfu The story of an unspoiled island and an English family making a home by the Aegean Sea.In the early 1960s Emma Tennant's parents, on a cruise, spotted a magical bay and decided to build a house there.This book is the story of that house, Rovinia, set above the bay in Corfu where legend has it Ulysses was shipwrecked and found by Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous. It is also the story of the couple who have been at Rovinia since the feast in the grove that followed the roof-raising-Maria, a miraculous cook and the presiding spirit of the house, and her husband, Thodoros-and of the inhabitants of the local village, high on the hill above the bay. Tennant offers us the delights of quotidian adventures-salt water in the well, roads to nowhere, collapsing walls-all hilariously presented. That the house is still lived in and loved, with new generations coming to understand the delights of Corfu, is a tribute to the people and a special landscape which is distinctly Greek.

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The Priest Fainted Like a promise, the peaks rise in the distance, garlanded in gorges and wild onions, goats and streams." This closely autobiographical novel follows the fortunes of a 21-year-old Greek-American woman as she returns to the land of her foremothers and reimagines their lives and her own in terms of classic Greek myths. Food, (the book's title is the name of a popular eggplant dish), mythology, religion, and feminism are just a few of the themes Davidson's heroine touches on in the course of her year in Greece as she caroms between the personal (her Greek relatives, an affair with a Greek-American basketball player) and the political: the circumscribed lives of women down through the years. By the end of the book, the narrator has realized that no individual life story exists in a vacuum; in order to understand ourselves, we must understand those who came before.

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This Way to Paradise--Dancing on the Tables THE GREEK AMERICAN ..a carnival of a book that is a non-stop read and which cannot totally be described as either a travel book, a personal memoir, or a cultural study of changing times in Greece. It is all of these and more.

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for Greece and the Greek Islands

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