Ruin: Essays in Exilic Living [Paperback]

The essays inRuinlink meditations on teaching, friendship, motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language of politics and advertising, Occupy Wall Street, and the Parthenon Marbles into a relentless interrogation of identity and loss. Kalfopoulous Athens and New York are twinned sites of perpetual dislocation, palimpsests of political, economic, culturaland personalcrisis. The refugee, the immigrant, the fragmented I charted in these essaysall are studies in exilic living, pilgrims wandering the wreckage of late capitalism.

In Adrianne Kalfopoulous brilliant book of essays,Ruin, we accompany her on the pitted road of motherhood, friendship, love, the financial meltdown of Greeceand, centrally, the pilgrims journey into memory. Kalfopoulous mediations are more politically incisive than any other book of personal essays Ive read in ages. Her self-possession and attention to suffering and her pitch of self-questioning are sharp and rare. As with the finest essayists, she is like pagans respectful of what the unpredictable might have in store for us. But never too respectful. I am a reluctant traveler, she tells us, but in her company, we never are.
David Lazar, author ofOccasional Desire
?
Balancing along the boundary that separates memoir, travel writing, and journalism, Adrianne Kalfopoulous book of linked essays,Ruin, courageously explores not only cities (Athens, New York, Freiburg, among others) but states of mind and soul in a pulsing, fraying time. Kalfopoulous writing draws us into her sensibility; readingRuin, we share her honesty and anger, her vulnerability and nerve, her sense of humor and beauty. Not a relaxing read,Ruinis always stimulating, mercurial, and enlightening.
Rachel Hadas, author ofThe Golden Road
?
Ruin: Essays in Exilic Lifeis a palimpsest of cultural and personal crisis moments. Throughout, an inner yel3o