BookFeed Ελληνικά A prince who cannot go home, a prince who cannot act, a woman who keeps being wrong about a proud man: what these books share is the pressure of a mind arguing with itself, in language you can hear out loud. Take «Ομήρου Οδύσσεια Τόμος Α» or Hamlet and you get the same thing at different removes, a person thinking his way through a world that keeps interrupting him.
A page that shows it
On a wild beach, a man who has lost everything hides in dead leaves like a fire that won't go out.
Και τούτο συμφερώτερο του εφάνη• προς το δάσοςεκίνησε, και τωύρηκεν εις το νερό πλησίον,’ς ανοικτόν τόπον• έσκυψε κάτω από δυό δενδρούλιαομόρριζα, και το ’να εληά, και τ’ άλλο ήταν αγρίλι•κει μέσα ούτ’ άνεμοι φυσούν με την υγρή πνοή τους,ούτε του ηλιού πότ’ έφθασαν η φωτειναίς ακτίνες,ούτε η βροχή τα έσπασε• τόσο πυκνά πλεγμέναήσαν μαζή• κ’ εσύρθηκε ’ς εκείν’ ο Οδυσσέας,κ’ ευθύς στρώσιν εστοίβασε πλατειά με τα δυο χέρια•ότ’ ήσαν φύλλα περισσά χυμέν’ αυτού, ’π’ αρκούσαννα φυλαχθούν άνθρωποι δυο και τρεις ’ς ώρα χειμώνος,και αν ψύχος έπνεε δριμύ• τα είδε κ’ εχάρη ο θείοςο άνδρας ο πολύπαθος, και του σωρού ’ς την μέσηεπλάγιασε κ’ επάνω του έχυσε φύλλα πλήθος. Όμηρος, -700
A prince discovers he is not the master of his house, a soldier turns down immortality, and a naked man falls asleep in a pile of leaves on a beach. The Odyssey, translated with a rough, sweet, immediate Greekness by the Ionian poet who gave it its modern Greek voice.
William Shakespeare, 1603
A prince in mourning delays, dissembles, and thinks too much, while a court watches every move. Read for the language, stay for the recognitions.
Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης, 1937
A civil servant in Alexandria turns Greek history into a mirror for every reader who has failed at something or is tempted to give up. Read one poem a night, and it stays with you.
Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης, 1968
Cavafy's secret drawer: poems he never published, from chess-game allegories and lost youth to homoerotic confession and the last Greek emperor.
Jane Austen, 1813
A sharp-eyed comedy about money, manners and misjudgment, in which a quick-witted woman and a proud man keep being wrong about each other. Funnier and more cutting than its reputation suggests.
William Shakespeare, 1597
Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love over three days, and the adults around them keep choosing sides.
Όμηρος, -750
A war ten years old and still not won: the quarrel, the losses, and the two impossible choices that keep people fighting.
Ουίλλιαμ Σαίξπηρ, 1623
A brave man hears a promise that he will be king, and discovers how quickly the wish becomes the plan. Betrayal, and the restlessness comes from within. The speech that will never leave your head.
William Shakespeare, 1606
A soldier is greeted by three strangers who promise him a crown, and we watch, line by line, how quickly a decent man can argue himself into murder.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1830
Ο εθνικός ποιητής γράφει σάτιρα: ένας ζυγιαστής ζυγίζει ανθρώπους, πουλιά και πολιτικούς, κι ένα ποίημα βγαίνει από ένα όνειρο και μια τρίχα.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
In these fragmentary poems, lost characters search their own memories, unsure which words are theirs and which belong to the dead.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1825
Solomos turns Byron's death into a lament for Greece: the poet as freedom's herald, sung in the ragged, luxurious Greek that literature forgot.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
The poems Solomos wrote while inventing a Greek poetry that could carry a nation — fragments of longing, grief and resurrection, some never finished.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
A fierce, strange prose satire that turns Zakynthian society into a stage for hypocrisy, war, and moral judgment.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
At the siege of Missolonghi, hunger and danger contend with spring’s beauty, remembered love and the will to remain free.
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
Songs, fragments and unfinished poems in which private grief, natural beauty and the struggle for freedom meet in startling images.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
A short, dazzling novel about a summer of parties on Long Island and the man who throws them for one reason. Every sentence is built to be reread, and the ending is hard to shake.
Mary Shelley, 1818
A young scientist makes life and then cannot face what he has made. Told in nested voices, it asks who owes what to whom, and why ambition so often ends in solitude.
Homer, -800
The first great story about a journey home — and every stop along the way is a good reason to give up.
Emily Brontë, 1847
A storm of a love story told by two unreliable narrators, in which childhood devotion curdles into revenge across two generations on the Yorkshire moors.
Oscar Wilde, 1890
A beautiful young man wishes his portrait would age in his place. It is a sharp, funny, then frightening study of vanity, charm and moral drift, still uncomfortably current.
Charlotte Brontë, 1847
An orphan with no money, no beauty and a ferocious sense of her own worth takes a job at a strange house. A first-person voice that still feels startlingly direct.
Alexandre Dumas, 1844
A young sailor is betrayed on his wedding day and spends fourteen years in prison. Then he returns, rich and unrecognisable, to dismantle the lives of the men who put him there.
Jane Austen, 1811
Two sisters, one who feels everything and one who shows nothing, discover what each kind of restraint costs and conceals.
The mind can make a prison out of the one door it cannot see through.
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;Hamlet · William Shakespeare
At night, things without names walk through your room.
Την νύκτα, Δέσποτα Χριστέ μου,
τον νου και την ψυχή μου φύλαττέ μου
σαν γύρω μου αρχινούν και περπατούνε
Όντα και Πράγματα που όνομα δεν έχουν
και τ’ άσαρκα ποδάρια των στην κάμαρή μου τρέχουν
και κάμνουν στο κρεβάτι μου κύκλο για να με διούνε —
και με κοιτάζουν σαν να με γνωρίζουν
σαν να καγχάζουν άφωνα που τώρα με φοβίζουν.Ανέκδοτα · Κωνσταντίνος Καβάφης
A man reframes his self-interest as an act of atonement.
Having now a good house and a very sufficient income, he intended to marry; and in seeking a reconciliation with the Longbourn family he had a wife in view, as he meant to choose one of the daughters, if he found them as handsome and amiable as they were represented by common report. This was his plan of amends—of atonement—for inheriting their father’s estate; and he thought it an excellent one, full of eligibility and suitableness, and excessively generous and disinterested on his own part.Pride and Prejudice · Jane Austen
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