News from the Village: Aegean Friends

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, poet 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. "News from the Village" 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. This book is richly evocative and rare."