“In an unrehearsed, around-the-fire sense, Petrakis is a storyteller, concerned not with developing character or reproducing human speech, but with the tale and its moral resonance. These 37 stories, six of which are published for the first time...

In "Cavafy's Stone and Other Village Tales," among those we meet are an old village priest who has his life upended by the vision of a lovely young tourist bathing naked in a mountain stream; a homosexual schoolteacher trapped in the rigid mores o...

At the heart of this New York Times best-selling novel, we find Leonidas Matsoukas, operator of the Pindar Counseling Service (solutions provided for all problems of life and love); proponent of wildly creative get-rich-quick schemes; passionately...

"Every man's life is an Odyssey; it does not matter if the body remains rooted in one place, for it is the heart and the spirit that journey to Ithaca." So speaks Father Marias, the close friend and the wise spiritual adviser to Kostas Volakis -...

Featuring many of the characters that appeared in Petrakis’ earlier book “The Hour of the Bell,” “The Shepherds of Shadows” depicts the horrors of war in battle scenes that that echo the visceral starkness of conflict foun...

In Journal of a Novel, Harry Mark Petrakis reveals personal aspects of his life and work. The complex relationship between writing and living is clearly drawn, and we see at work here the process by which a writer turns his raw experience into art...

Twilight of the Ice, from acclaimed storyteller Harry Mark Petrakis, is a dramatic tale of revelation and redemption set against the backdrop of the 1950s Chicago rail yards. In a classic yarn expertly balancing the realistic with the mythic, Petr...

From the time of Homer, an ancient law decrees that a man must take vengeance on the slayer of his brother. Only in that way may the curse of murder be erased and the dead be allowed to rest in peace. For two young men from Crete, turn-of-the-ce...

When last seen in Petrakis's earlier novel, "A Dream of Kings," Leonidas Matsoukas was the vigorous proponent of wildly creative get-rich-quick schemes; a passionately loving husband, father, and sometime philanderer; an incorrigible gambler; a mi...

In 1919, Nick Dandolos arrived in America from Greece in search of the dream America inspired throughout the world. Instead, tempted into a high-stakes game of cards, he is driven to humiliation and defeat. From these depths he begins his painstak...