Thanassis Valtinos was born in 1932 in Kastri, Kynourias in the Peloponnese. He has written novels, novellas, short stories, and film scripts and translated ancient Greek tragedies for the theater. His work has been translated into many languages and has earned him numerous awards, including Best Film Script (Cannes Festival 1984), the Greek State Prize for Best Novel (1990), the International Cavafy Prize (2002), the Petros Haris Prize, conferred by the Academy of Athens for Lifetime Achievement (2002), the Gold Cross of Honour of the President of the Greek Democracy (2003), and the Greek State Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2012). In 2008 he was elected a member of the Greek Academy and served as its president in 2016. He is currently president of the board of directors of the Petros Haris Foundation, a position he has held since 2013.

No one matches Thanassis Valtinos’s ability to capture Greece’s twentieth-century experience in all its complexity and breadth—and this collection brings together wonderful translations of some of his best works. —Stathis Kalyvas, Oxford University

Jane Assimakopoulos and Stavros Deligiorgis’s translations rise deftly to the many challenges presented by these four important works by Thanassis Valtinos, with their range of tones, registers, and narrative styles. The writing is, like Valtinos’s, spare and strong, with rare lyrical flashes, and a force and forward momentum that keep you turning the pages until the very end. —Karen Emmerich, Princeton University

Traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel, Walter Benjamin once observed. In Valtinos’s stories, a master prose strategist manipulates form, texture, and momentum into a voice that bears witness to the deepest tracks of a turbulent Greek experience. Recognizing and confronting this image in the present is a heart-rending and urgent experience. —Vangelis Calotychos, Brown University

Thanassis Valtinos’s prose is distinguished by an ongoing dialogue with key periods of twentieth-century Greek history. It is driven by the desire to give voice to anonymity and therefore to that which history forgets, marginalizes, or leaves out. These long-awaited translations of his early novellas and short stories capture Valtinos’s unique story-telling style and effectively convey the orality of his heroes. —Anthony Dracopoulos, University of Sydney

Valtinos’s fiction questions the solidity of the past by bringing together documentation and self-doubt, an anxiety about history, and a preoccupation with language and form. This collection of his early works offers insights into the artistry of one of Greece’s most influential writers. —Dimitris Tziovas, University of Birmingham