A Balkan Man in the Americas

I am sitting on one of the blue shuttle buses going toward Boston airport. I am searching the pages of Europe, travels through the twentieth century, the book of Geert Mak, looking for a precise quote I intend to use in an essay I am writing currently. I find it, finally: “Blood is stronger than any passport” – one of the slogans of the Nazis in the 30s. I take my eyes off the book and start staring out of the bus window. I see a Smoking Shelter across the street, next to the airport. This is the first time I see something similar. It looks like a glass-cage; there is someone smoking there, but he stands out of the cage, out of the smoking shelter. Repeating silently the words “Smoking Shelter”, the words "Fallout Shelter" follow suit in my brain, like an association of ideas. Who knows, one day, smokers would have to buy or rent fallout shelters, in order to be allowed to smoke. - “Excuse me, are you American?”. A female voice, in her forties, sitting next to me, ...

I have had the chance to interview many interesting people from different paths of life (some of them for my weekly radio show in the Greek Public Radio - once upon a time). At the same time I have been often interviewed by others.  Interviewing is an art, a fragile and difficult one. Some weeks ago I had the honor to be the guest of Eleanor Watchel in her CBC Radio's  Writers & Company . She was in her studio in Canada and I had to talk with her from a studio in Boston. It was the smallest studio I had ever encountered. When I first saw how "microscopic" it  was, I got concerned and somehow anxious. The first thought coming to my mind was that  I was not going to afford more than 30 minutes staying in there. Finally, we talked for almost one hour and a half. I totally forgot about the “oppressive” dimensions of the studio and about time. Eleanor Wachtel is one of the most amazing interviewers I have known. Her series of interviews " Gr...

«Two lightening bolts were delivered to my room/ they were gifts from Zeus/In the cradle of Democracy/ The pigeons are wearing gas masks” Two lightening bolts filled up with explosive black humor from Nick Cave, which crashes the myth of Zeus, calling the “darling little boys” who evoke his inheritance, to get out of their myths of the past and look at the present in the face. Wake up - before it’s too late, before it gets so ridiculously and tragically dark, before “we are, I say, mostly lost”…

This is an excerpt from my last book, The Last Page, published some three weeks ago. It has been trasnlated and edited by Gigi Papoulias It took a woman from China to make him understand that being happy with one woman is not enough to keep you from lusting after or falling in love with another. The secret-Jew had it all. He had an enviable position at the National Library which allowed him to read forbidden books in French – an act which was prohibited for m ost of the mere mortals in Albania. He often felt like he belonged to the finest caste of people and this filled him with self-confidence and great joy which led to a feeling of superiority. His life was filled with the presence of his beautiful wife and their young son. Until one day, literally out of the blue, she appeared. She had come to the National Library for two months, as part of an “exchange of experiences between workers of the two peoples of communist countries.” Perhaps it was the French which she spoke t...