Harry Mark Petrakis: 16 books

When Harry Mark Petrakis' autobiography of his early years, Stelmark, first appeared in print, the New York Times reviewer, Thomas Losk, hailed it as 'pungent and heartwarming, combining concrete particulars with the spiritual values they embody." The book recounts Petrakis' coming of age in...

In this warmhearted and luminous collection of his non-fiction writings, Harry Mark Petrakis carries his readers on an odyssey that spans a lifetime. "I hold a browned photograph of my parents and older brothers and sisters taken shortly before they emigrated to America from the island...

Legends of Glory and Other Stories contains a novella and eight short stories by award-winning author Harry Mark Petrakis. In a departure from his previous, highly regarded work, Petrakis offers a fresh perspective in the novella "Legends of Glory." For the first time, Petrakis deals with...

In 1821, in the geographically small but culturally and historically rich country of Greece, a revolution began to overturn four terrible centuries of slavery the Greeks had endured under the Ottoman Turks. Harry Mark Petrakis’s historical novel "The Hour of the Bell" recalls the first...

In 'The Orchards of Ithaca,' celebrated Chicago novelist Harry Mark Petrakis enhances his vigorous naturalism with humor, charm, and revelation. From the street-level vantage point of Orestes Panos, a prosperous restaurateur on the eve of his fiftieth year and the coming millennium, Petrakis personalizes...

Twilight of the Ice, from acclaimed storyteller Harry Mark Petrakis, is a dramatic tale of revelation and redemption set against the backdrop of the 1950s Chicago rail yards. In a classic yarn expertly balancing the realistic with the mythic, Petrakis chronicles the life of Mike Zervakis, a Greek...

In Journal of a Novel, Harry Mark Petrakis reveals personal aspects of his life and work. The complex relationship between writing and living is clearly drawn, and we see at work here the process by which a writer turns his raw experience into art. The creative process is the subject here,...

From the ageless elements of great drama — love and hate, fear and hope, war and retribution — Harry Mark Petrakis, twice nominated for the National Book Awards fiction prize, has spun a modern classic, a novel to stir the senses and to warm the heart. In the Land of Morning is woven of...

From the time of Homer, an ancient law decrees that a man must take vengeance on the slayer of his brother. Only in that way may the curse of murder be erased and the dead be allowed to rest in peace. For two young men from Crete, turn-of-the-century America does not hold the usual immigrant...

Featuring many of the characters that appeared in Petrakis’ earlier book “The Hour of the Bell,” “The Shepherds of Shadows” depicts the horrors of war in battle scenes that that echo the visceral starkness of conflict found in Homer's “Iliad.” The novel also includes a vivid portrayal...

In 1919, Nick Dandolos arrived in America from Greece in search of the dream America inspired throughout the world. Instead, tempted into a high-stakes game of cards, he is driven to humiliation and defeat. From these depths he begins his painstaking mastery of the skills of gambling under the tutelage...

“In an unrehearsed, around-the-fire sense, Petrakis is a storyteller, concerned not with developing character or reproducing human speech, but with the tale and its moral resonance. These 37 stories, six of which are published for the first time, concern Greek grocers, tavern-keepers and shoemakers,...

When last seen in Petrakis's earlier novel, "A Dream of Kings," Leonidas Matsoukas was the vigorous proponent of wildly creative get-rich-quick schemes; a passionately loving husband, father, and sometime philanderer; an incorrigible gambler; a mighty fighter; and purveyor of advice and...

At the heart of this New York Times best-selling novel, we find Leonidas Matsoukas, operator of the Pindar Counseling Service (solutions provided for all problems of life and love); proponent of wildly creative get-rich-quick schemes; passionately loving husband and father, equally passionate lover...