News from The Village
ByPublisher Description
In his twenties, an American manual laborer and poet found himself living with his beautiful wife in a village in southern Greece. Their first encounter with that country would prove an unrecoverable dream of intimate magic, but through decades of steadfast affection, David Mason grew to a deeper understanding of what it means to be a citizen of one's own country and a citizen of the world.
From a writer praised for his "often intoxicating language" (
),
is a lyrical memoir of Aegean friends, including such figures as Orhan Pamuk, Bruce Chatwin, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Yiorgos Chouliaras, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, each of whom comes fully alive, along with a brilliant cast of lesser-known characters. Fearing he has lost Greece and everything it has meant in his life, Mason goes back again and again to the country he knew as a young man. He encounters Turkey and Greece together in the shadow of 9/11; follows the lives of his friends, whose trials sometimes surpass his own; and brings them all together in the circle of this generous narrative. Ultimately, Mason's memoir is about what we can hold and what slips away, what sustains us all through our griefs and disappointments.
"Mason realizes he must confront shifting politics, village tensions, family tragedy, and history with blood on its hands before he can love Greece as she is rather than as he would have her be. Along the way, he introduces us to a rich cast of writers and ex-pats, shepherds and urbanites—and travels that stretch from the Rockies to the Bosphorus—the journey of a lifetime."—A.E. Stallings, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of
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About David Mason
David Mason's books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award), and Arrivals. His first novel, Ludlow, was published in 2007, and named best poetry book of the year by the Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, Mason has co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. His poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in such periodicals as Harper's, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review. He has also written the libretto for composer Lori Laitman's opera of The Scarlet Letter. He recently won the Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize for the development of a new libretto. A former Fulbright Fellow to Greece, he lives near the Garden of the Gods with his wife, Anne Lennox.
Other books by David Mason
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