Dinner with Persephone

the long version

"I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." So begins this astonishing memoir of fantastical peregrinations throughout Greece. Dinner with Persephone is an indelible masterwork about a place and a people whose culture has influenced us all. With great smartness of style, winning detail, and infectious humor, acclaimed poet and essayist Patricia Storace magically conjures up noisy, anarchic cities and quiet, idyllic towns and harbors, where the. Unseen worlds of the past - the Roman, the Byzantine, the Ottoman - continue to make their presence felt. She evokes with sympathy and irony the social mores and religious customs and rites of a highly varied and paradoxical people who contentiously affirm their legacy as Greeks but suffer at the same time from profound xenomania - a people fascinated by the dual nature of all things: the transsexual, the biracial, the mother/whore.