A Petrakis Reader Author:Harry Mark Petrakis Twenty-eight extraordinary tales by one of America's most beloved and respected writers, published together for the first time and with commentaries on each story written by Mr. Petrakis especially for this volume. The stories range from "Pericles on 31st Street," his first published work, to his recent "The Judgment," and span the whole realm o... more »f human hope and suffering.
The characters who populate his stories are flesh-and-blood, they live next door to us, love, work, and die within the scope of their particular visions, and yet their personal struggles become the struggles of all of us through Petrakis' skillful telling. In "The Bastard of Thanos" a fiery dying poet recognizes his most potent creation in the person of his bastard son; Polish icement suffer the fate of some great doomed Greek line in "The Passing of the Ice"; in "The Song of Rodanthe," a fleeting blossom of love flowers even within the confines of a grim social prison; and in "The Journal of a Wife-Beater" an insufferable male chauvinist discovers, to his horror and bodily peril, that his wife is younger, stronger, and even more vengeful than he is.« less