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On the occasion of the publication of her first novella, *Sundays, in Summer*, Marialena Semitekolou gave an interview to Sofia Politou-Ververi of Nakas bookshops. Read it below: Your debut with the book ‘Sundays, in Summer’ is a powerful one; it is a very expressive book with a heroine who draws us into her heavy inaction. Tell us about your choice to present Marina, the protagonist of your book, within the summer atmosphere of a city. Summer is not an ‘easy’ season. I chose it for Marina precisely for this reason. It is the season when people – young and old – grow up. Our growing up is not all joy; it involves pain and disappointments. Yet, in a strange paradox, the time of summer – which makes us grow up – seems to stand still; it doesn’t do you any favours: it is slow to turn to night, the days last longer, and one has the feeling that the slowness of summer time is constantly asking something of you. It was, then, this contradiction of simultaneous growth and suspension that probably led me to summer. And indeed, an urban summer that intensifies this sensation and gives it the image of a prolonged pause, rather than enriching it, which is what would happen in a natural landscape bathed in summer light.There is no typical happy ending in your book; what was your intention when you began writing your book ‘Sundays, in the Summer’?I knew the book’s final sentence and was entirely focused on it long before I wrote what came before. So perhaps it is a book written from the end to the beginning, rather than the other way round. On the other hand, I don’t know how common happy endings are, how long they last, how they’re defined or what they actually mean… In the case, say, of Marina, what sort of twist on her Sunday would constitute ‘a typical happy ending’? I don’t know… We’ve often wondered whether Marina suffers from depression. We’ve also wondered whether her behaviour reflects a large proportion of young people in our country. What would you say to us?I am sceptical about the ‘ease’ with which we conclude that someone is suffering from depression. I have the feeling, that is, that the verb ‘to suffer’, followed by a diagnosis, is a sign of the times we live in, and that it shuts people down rather than helping them to grow. What does, say, depression mean in Marina’s case? I prefer to describe her as a woman who surrenders to the allure of the melancholy that all Sundays inherently possess. If she suffers from anything, I imagine she suffers from the fact that she is alive... however paradoxical that may sound. In that sense, yes. She reflects a large proportion of young people, and of course those older in age, who are alive. What I don’t know is to what extent, both young people and older ones, we can bear to go with the flow that Marina is on, rather than sitting in front of a screen, idling or typing.What do you think is really missing from Marina to set her in motion, to pull her out of her sterile passivity? I wouldn’t for the life of me want to describe Marina’s passivity as sterile. I love her very much and I’d be doing her an injustice if I did. Marina’s ‘passivity’ harbours a whole host of things that will either help her grow or destroy her. I don’t know the outcome of this situation, although deep down I’d like the first scenario to come true, and I fear the second!How much did your studies in psychology help you in shaping Marina’s personality and the environment in which she moves? I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that question. I imagine that my studies in psychology helped in some way. But the reverse could also be true. I really enjoy observing people and describing them from within, and that is perhaps why I decided to study psychology. If I had to say what helped me most in writing this story, I’d say it was all the summers I’ve spent in the city, reading other people’s stories or watching them at the cinema.After Marina in the height of summer, what can we expect from you? Do you have any ideas swirling around in your mind to get you started on writing?I’m very drawn to the idea of parallel monologues that ‘respond’ to one another, without ever knowing or finding out about it. I have a feeling this idea will torment me more than the idea of Marina. Marina was extremely kind and generous towards me. Where can we meet you online and in person? I’d love to tell you that you’ll find me in bars and cafés in the city centre. Even more so that I’ll always be on the terrace of a summer cinema and/or in the dark auditorium of a winter one, waiting for the opening credits of a much-anticipated film... Most likely, however, you’ll find me on public transport to and from the city centre or see me walking around my neighbourhood, doing all those everyday chores that help families function...

On the occasion of his visit to Greece, George Saunders gave an extremely interesting interview to Sakis Ioannidis for the newspaper Kathimerini. Read it below: One of Harry Houdini’s first tricks was to free himself from a pair of handcuffs. The locksmith who made them had spent five years perfecting the security mechanism, and it did indeed take the resourceful conjurer over an hour to escape. On the shoulders of the cheering crowd, the king of escape wept. The American short-story writer George Saunders often brings Houdini to mind. The magician who set himself an ever more difficult problem each time. If he failed to unlock his chains, he would fail; but if he freed himself, then the problem became a trick, a performance. His latest book and first novel, ‘Oblivion and Lincoln’ (trans. Giorgos - Ikaros Babasakis, published by Ikaros), won him the Booker Prize in 2017. It is a journey of emotions, humour, love, and the struggle between good and evil in the ‘in-between’, in a spiritual state between the living and the dead, which unfolds as Abraham Lincoln visits the grave of his eleven-year-old son Willie in Georgetown Cemetery. Often, Mr Saunders felt the fear of Houdini struggling to free himself from his bonds. ‘If, as an artist, you want to tackle something difficult, you have to think of new tricks; the old ones won’t work,’ he tells us. “A historical novel, the death of a child, Lincoln – it’s like saying ‘I’m going to write a novel from a chicken’s point of view’. At first you’ll say, hmm, yeah, okay, but if you pull it off, you’ll be like Houdini,” he tells us. The worry Like everything else in his writing life, his latest book began with problems. “When I start a project, my mind makes a list of problems, such as that it might turn out badly, be banal, or tedious, and then I know I have a project. I was worried, but at this stage of my career, not worrying is dangerous. ‘I know how to write a story, and that’s the danger,’ he tells us. George Saunders was born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas, with Greek roots tracing back to his great-grandfather in Crete. He grew up just outside Chicago in a family full of humour and funny stories. He studied engineering and for a time worked for an oil company that sent him to Sumatra in Indonesia. Until college, he had never left the US, and the travels he undertook afterwards changed his views; he moved from being a conservative to the political spectrum of the American Left. In 1986, at the age of 28, he was accepted onto the creative writing programme at Syracuse University, with the writer Tobias Wolff as his tutor and mentor.Sipping small sips of coffee from a paper cup, dressed in a dark short-sleeved shirt and black trousers that he frequently pulls up – he forgot to tuck in his waistband– he speaks nervously and effusively about his time in Syracuse, Chekhov’s stories, his admiration for Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, and his image of what it means to be a writer. ‘I was young and thought that a writer had to be tough, drunk, uncompromising, and Toby (ed. Tobias Wolff) was none of those things. He was tough but kind, and I’d just watch him with his family, how he’d come and give a wonderful lesson, how he’d write his beautiful stories, and there was something liberating about it all. ‘You could be yourself; you just had to have an original idea,’ he tells us. Mr Saunders now teaches budding American writers on the creative writing programme at Syracuse University. Every year, there are around 650 applications for just six places, and we ask him about the tradition of American writers in the short form of the short story. In the America of ‘pragmatists’, he tells us, there is a tradition opposed to intellectuals that makes young writers feel uncomfortable with the grand themes of literature, a factor, he points out, that has favoured the development of the short story. ‘They feel more at ease with Hemingway’s approach: crafting something small and beautiful and letting the truth spring from within. The other reason is financial. Creative writing programmes are a great opportunity for young writers to enjoy a few years of freedom and favour short stories; they work best in the short form,” he emphasises.George Saunders is considered one of the greatest contemporary American short story writers, yet he shuns the ‘big issues’ that preoccupy other writers and remains ‘silent’ when his colleagues speak of ‘ideas’. ‘Writers like Roth come in through the front door and change the house. I come in through the basement window and thresh the grain in there. I’m like a thief, I look at the house and think about which window I can sneak through. I think I can contribute something regarding class issues. I’ve written about it and I’ll write about it again. I come from a middle-class family; in my twenties I lived at a lower level and I think I understand quite a lot about this subject, which is important and has been neglected. But when I see writers like Roth, Wallace, Flannery O’Connor, I think they’re simply brilliant. ‘I’m playing at a lower level, but I do it with passion and perhaps I can offer something,’ he tells us. His public silence, however, vanishes when he enters the writing process, where he poses questions without knowing the answers in advance. Thus, ‘Lethis and Lincoln’ touches on issues at the heart of America, such as slavery and racism, by placing in the narrative black people who have died, buried in an isolated mass grave. ‘I didn’t want to deal with slavery at first; I found it difficult for me. But then I thought, we’re in the Civil War, there’s Lincoln, we need some Black voices. Then it becomes automatic: where are they, why aren’t they allowed to be with the others, why is there a boundary? Suddenly you have all their stories. If you start this process and decide to be honest, the world will flood into your book whether you want it to or not,” he emphasises. “‘The ideas of humanity and kindness do not exist.’ Abraham Lincoln is something of a Jesus figure in American political history, and beyond. He is a figure recognised throughout the world, who steered the Union’s fortunes during the American Civil War, abolished slavery, modernised the economy, and whose face still appears on posters, T-shirts and American banknotes. The death of little Willie, the family’s third child, from typhoid fever, left a deep mark on Lincoln, who visited the child’s grave alone after the funeral.The idea of writing about the tragic event had been on George Saunders’ mind for 20 years. ‘There is a moment of truth when you realise that you are resisting something because it is difficult. If you do that, it means the end of your career. I trusted the feeling of terror I was experiencing, the one you feel when you see a beautiful person and are afraid to speak to them,” he tells us.The book’s publication coincided with Donald Trump’s election, and whilst he himself feared the book would be judged as ultra-patriotic (he firmly believed in Hillary Clinton’s election), people saw Lincoln and America in a different light. “It was as if they were saying, ‘Look at this wonderful thing we had, we took it for granted and now it’s changing’.”Historical sources coexist with ghosts, which give the book its distinctive flavour, its poignancy and its humour. The author likes them because they remind us that the world seems complete ‘because our senses are limited’.Loss and the process of mourning run through Mr Saunders’s book, and when asked whether addressing the subject through the novel helped him come to terms with the idea of mortality, the answer comes effortlessly: ‘Only because it didn’t happen to me!’ Neurotic and nervous Years ago, during a routine flight, one of the engines on the aircraft Mr Saunders was travelling in failed and cut out mid-air. “All I remember is saying ‘no, no, no, no’, as if I wanted to go back in time and have people say no, that’s not how it works,” he notes. He hasn’t come to terms with many things in general; he remains neurotic and nervous, he says, whilst as he grows older he realises that if he makes it to the end without major losses, in good health and with some sense of fulfilment, “it’s pure luck, it’s not something you earn”.The ‘corrosive idea’ of American capitalism, he emphasises, boils down to the simplistic notion that if you have a nice car, you’ve earned it; if you don’t, then it’s your own problem. “There is no compassion in this logic; the sense that anything can happen to anyone. This also applies to American politics: if you are unlucky, there is a sense that the responsibility lies solely with you,” he notes.Raised on the teachings of the Catholic Church at a time when the idea of the spiritual person came first, he now sees the world turning away from spirituality. “Throughout my life, I have seen materialism triumph over spirituality,” notes Mr Saunders, who has turned to the teachings of Buddhism. Blind faith in the slogan “America First” is terrifying, he points out. “The ideas they ought to be following—humanism, kindness, spirituality—are nowhere to be found. I don’t just mean Trump; the whole government is like that. This does not suggest a serious culture,” he concludes.

Read the fascinating interview given by Athanasios Alexandridis to clinical psychologist Magdalini Georgiakou for PsychologyNow.gr, on the occasion of his new book *Children’s Fears*, the second in his series ‘School for Anxious Parents’. MG: Your new book is titled ‘Children’s Fears’. How did ‘Children’s Fears’ come about after ‘Children’s Loves’? AA: A year after the publication of ‘Children’s Loves’ comes the companion volume, ‘Children’s Fears’. If one considers that Love—the life force according to psychoanalysts, or Friendship according to the ancient Greek philosophers—unites the things of this world, it was necessary, after Love, to examine the action of aggression, which aims to unite them by force or to separate and destroy them when they resist. When, in the mixture of Love and hostility, Neikos according to the ancient Greeks, the latter prevails, then all the phenomena of fear are created, from terror and panic to fear itself or anxiety. MG: When we talk about ‘childhood fears’, what are we referring to? What ages do they correspond to? AA: The book attempts an extensive description of children’s fears, but also of parents’ fears regarding their children’s development. It follows the developmental trajectory and so, after an introduction to the concept of fear, it examines chronic and situational fears, bullying within and outside the family, the fear of loss and death, existential fear, separation anxiety, fear of camp, addiction to digital media, and the fear of difference, politicisation and terrorism.In a way, we could say that the narrative begins with the fears of the very young child—those we psychoanalytically refer to as primal anxieties—which concern the question of existence in the world ‘in life or in death’ —which we experience very early on, though it will take many years before we understand it—and moves on to the fears associated with having discovered the other person as someone I need or desire, and so I fear being abandoned by them, their anger, their rejection, the withdrawal of their love from me.The book examines the involvement of parents in these fears, which are quite complex because they often recall or even reproduce their own childhood or long-standing fears. Throughout the book, a constant concern is the intrusion of the social sphere into the family, which, in the form of roles, rules or prejudices, is always present, compelling and, depending on the family’s ability to integrate it, either constructive or disruptive. MG: How do you think the times and society in which we live influence parents in their role and in managing their children’s fears? AA: This era of ongoing and global social crisis greatly influences parents in managing their children’s psychological issues. Professional and financial insecurity, along with the relative unreliability of institutions, have stirred up fears in most parents and adults, as well as the long-standing childhood and adolescent fears they carry within them.Consequently, they have less tolerance for difficulties, whether these stem from the environment or from their children. If we accept that most people wish to be good parents and often feel guilty at the thought that they are not meeting their children’s needs, their children’s fears serve as a strong signal that they have not sufficiently established themselves in their children’s psyche as capable of protecting them. This is also consistent with the anxiety caused by unpredictable social instability. MG: When should parents be concerned about their children’s fears? AA: Whenever they become concerned! What I’m saying may sound funny, but it isn’t. The fact that they are worried is a clear sign that something is happening which the child, the parents themselves and the family system cannot organise or, in psychoanalytic terms, metabolise. Of course, with your question, you are asking to find out what symptoms might indirectly manifest children’s fears, apart from their direct and explicit expression.Because they can manifest indirectly through all manner of symptoms at the level of physical dysfunction, behavioural disturbance and psychological distress – and because I do not wish for parents to ‘play at being psychologists’– that is why I have set the psychodynamic criterion of parental concern as sufficient grounds for seeking a specialist’s opinion. Sometimes just a few appointments are enough to resolve a problem. At other times, fear can be an early symptom that allows for timely diagnosis and the start of monitoring or treatment. MG: What about parents’ fears? To what extent can these fears affect their children’s lives? AA: Unfortunately, there are fears held by parents, or even the parents of the parents, which can be passed on to the child. These are what we call ‘intergenerational traumas’. Unfortunately, we do not have the space here to explore such a serious topic in depth. However, a child’s fear may bring such a trauma to the surface and lead the ‘bearer’ of the trauma, e.g. the father or mother, to seek therapy. In closing this answer, however, I would like to emphasise my belief in children’s creativity and the fact that, often, with just a little help, they can achieve a great deal. MG: In the twelve chapters of the book, you provide a detailed account of various forms of childhood fears, such as timeless fears (fear of death, illness, abandonment) and contemporary fears such as the fear of dependence on electronics, fear of school bullying, etc. How, if at all, are these two categories of fears connected? AA: Your question already implies the answer! It naturally stems from the common psychoanalytic foundation of our thinking. To put it simply for readers: timeless fears form the psychological substrate. On top of these, the specific fears of each era manifest themselves, such as so-called school bullying, but also the fear of social stigma and exclusion. I believe that the fundamental work regarding these timeless fears must be carried out by the family and the school, with the main focus being on recognising the child, from a very young age, as a trustworthy partner in making and keeping agreements!MG: Won’t children feel that such an approach places an excessive burden on them? AA: No, not if the contracts and their requirements are appropriate to their age. On the contrary, they feel more self-confidence when an adult regards them as trustworthy individuals. And there is no greater shield against fears than feeling self-confidence. Look at folk tales: usually, the protagonist starts out as a small child who finds themselves in a difficult situation and is afraid. But when an adult, for example a genie, shows them trust, or a group of companions appoints them as leader, then that trust enables them to overcome their fears and put their mind—or rather, the psychomental programme of their development—into action.MG: Have we made the news? Am I to assume you’re working on a book about fairy tales? AA: I’m not afraid to admit it! But I do have some fear about whether I’ll manage it. MG: After all the books you’ve published, can you still have such fears? AA: As I say in my book, fear, if it is excessive, becomes disruptive; if it is manageable, it proves useful and motivating because it spurs our diligence and ingenuity. MG: I’d like to conclude with the issue of violence and terrorism, which are very much present in our times and are discussed at length in your book. The fear of terrorist attacks or violent clashes often drives parents to restrict their children. To what extent should this fear determine parents’ decisions regarding their children’s present and future? AA: If I had to summarise it in two sentences, I would say: a) restriction is not the solution; b) the solution lies in developing children’s political thinking and fostering a sense that they are citizens in the making from a very young age. The main areas for developing this fundamental quality are the family and school. The third volume of the series, which will focus on School and Society, will be devoted to these topics.

Read below the exclusive interview given by Juan Gabriel Vásquez to Athos Dimoulas for the magazine K of Kathimerini, on the occasion of the release of his latest book The Shape of the Remains (translated by Achilleas Kyriakidis). It is 7.30 in the morning in Bogotá and Juan Gabriel Vásquez is sitting at his desk. This is how his daily routine begins. He writes until midday. In the afternoon, he reads, writes articles and spends time with his family. The 45-year-old author returned a few years ago to the Colombian capital and his hometown, after fifteen years in Europe. The Bogotá he had left behind, the Bogotá of his childhood and youth, was a city ravaged by the relentless war with the drug cartels. A terrifying and dangerous place, full of explosions, gunfire and despair. Is there a sense of security today? I ask him. Have the ghosts of the past gone? ‘Oh, ghosts never go away,’ he replies. His own generation, he believes, will carry the scars of that period forever, and no one will ever feel truly safe. Vazquez gained worldwide attention a few years ago with the multi-award-winning bestseller The Sound of Things Falling (published by Ikaros), transporting us to the era of Pablo Escobar’s omnipotence, when he had turned the country into a battlefield. Today he returns with *The Shape of Remains* (published by Ikaros, translated by Achilleas Kyriakidis), a voluminous and ambitious novel, dense and satisfying, in which he examines the nature of conspiracy theories and how they define our relationship with the truth. The narrator (who is the author himself) meets a very unusual man who believes that ‘they are hiding something from us’ regarding the assassination of the popular politician Jorge Eliezer Gaitán in 1948. What gives rise to conspiracy theories? ‘Human nature,’ replies Vázquez. ‘We understand the world and ourselves through stories; without stories to interpret our experiences, we are orphans, living in a void. So, whenever the official narrative fails to provide us with a convincing account of significant events, we fill in the gaps with our own invented stories. Of course, this also happens when the available accounts, though true, simply do not satisfy us.’ Through his book, as with his previous ones, Vásquez delves into the history of his homeland – I should mention that everything I know about Colombia I have learnt from Márquez’s books, from films about Escobar and from his own novels. Does the novelist have a responsibility to convey the truth? Or at least a truth? ‘A truth, more accurately. I wouldn’t write novels just to say exactly what anyone can find in history books or on Wikipedia. Literature explores a different kind of truth: in my novels I try to say (to use Kundera’s words) what only novels can say. With that in mind, yes, I want to help my readers understand the history of my country, the continent and modern life. At one point in the book, the narrator/author reads the comments following one of his articles in the digital edition of the newspaper El Espectador (Vásquez does indeed write for this particular newspaper), in which, he writes, ‘highlighted everything that afflicted my poor country: intellectual poverty, self-satisfied mediocrity, unpunished defamation, but also, above all, verbal terrorism, the schoolyard bullying to which the participants devoted themselves with unimaginable enthusiasm, the cowardice of those who hurled abuse under pseudonyms and would never repeat their insults out loud.” I ask him if he holds the same view regarding social media: “No, no, social media is even worse. I don’t have any kind of profile on them, and I believe that’s the best decision I’ve ever made. For a decade now, I’ve been saying that Facebook and Twitter are destroying political dialogue, hindering our democratic expression and undermining our freedoms rather than strengthening them.”  Today, Vázquez is one of the leading figures of this fascinating new generation of Latin American literature, which includes (to name but a few who have been translated into Greek) the Chilean Alejandro Sabra, the Peruvian Santiago Roncagliolo, the Argentine Andrés Neumann, the Mexican Jorge Volpi and, of course, many others. Vázquez believes that Latin American literature is experiencing a new golden age, but he says there is nothing that unites him with his fellow Latin American writers, in the way that their forebears were united by a common political stance regarding the Cuban crisis. Nor are they united by their writing style, although one commonality we might identify is that they have moved beyond the influence of magical realism, which (somewhat simplistically) came to be identified with the tradition of Latin American literature. Specifically, Vázquez has often remarked that the aura of the fantastical has created a false perception of his continent, in whose modern history there is nothing ‘magical’, but, on the contrary, there is a series of tragic events that literature must address with realism. He always makes a point of clarifying, however, that had he not read Márquez in his adolescence, he would never have become a writer. ‘Finding your own literary voice, especially when you come from a strong literary tradition, is by no means easy, but personally I never wanted to break away from that tradition,’ he says. “It would be foolish to want to run away from a language that gave birth to the stories of Borges, *One Hundred Years of Solitude* (by Márquez) and *The War of the End of the World* (by Llosa).”  Writing gamesA little writing trick, if I may call it that, or a routine, if you will, which Vazquez reveals during our conversation is this: he chooses a book and reads it alongside the novel he is currently writing. Thirty minutes of reading before he starts writing. It works, he tells me, like the tuner musicians use for their instruments. It tunes him in. Even if the book he is writing and the one he is reading have nothing to do with each other. For *The Shape of Remains*, he used *Crime and Punishment* as his ‘tuner’. Another ‘trick’ he employs is the one already mentioned: the narrator’s complete identification with himself. His protagonist is called Juan Gabriel Vásquez; he is a writer who lived in Europe, wrote a book called The Sound of Things Falling, returned to Colombia, and so on. As he explained to me, he chose this approach because many of the events he describes actually happened to him, and he felt that their impact would be diminished if he spent time constructing a fictional character. In other words, he did indeed meet (for those who have read the book) a doctor who had inherited the remains of a murdered politician, at precisely the time his twin daughters were being born. This identification with the narrator allowed him to express himself more freely in certain places regarding his role as a writer. At one point he writes that ‘the writer tries to bridge the gap between what he does not know and what he can learn’, and then describes how some books constitute a ‘struggle’ for the writer with the world and with himself, and then states: ‘One writes a book like the one I am writing now and has blind faith that the book might matter to someone else too.’ I ask him whether writing The Form of the Relics was indeed a struggle for him. “It was the biggest and hardest battle I’ve ever fought as a writer. It was an incredibly difficult novel to write, and I’m very proud of the result.” And rightly so. The Shape of the Remains is one of the most compelling and best-written novels of recent years. ■