CORPUS CHRISTI is a favorite among my MFA writing students at the U. I left it in the hotel room in Athens, but I liked Perrotta's clean style and generous heart. LITTLE CHILDREN is being billed as a comic novel but it's neither funny nor truly sad, just a story about two limited people who fall and fail in love. Of course I wish I'd brought Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles with me but I was reluctant to overpack, so aside from a Greek phrasebook, a Lonely Planet and a Let’s Go, I only brought three books, LITTLE CHILDREN by Tom Perrotta, CORPUS CHRISTI by Bret Anthony Johnston, and Robert Fagles' new translation of THE ODYSSEY. There is a pie slice of Aegean off in the distance and ancient churches and stone shepherd's huts at every turn. Fruit trees are beginning to flower here and the hills are green with oxalis and studded with narcissus, wild thyme, and purple anemones. Yesterday I found a narrow path lined with Byzantine paving stones that threaded through low stone walls overlooking a valley below where farmers were building bonfires of last winter's dead boughs. Sometimes I wander through the narrow cobblestoned streets of the blue and white village but mostly I hike up to the hills. I am presently revising a collection of short stories, and I work every day until I am cross-eyed, then bolt down the marble stairs. I am in fact the only resident of The House of Literature! This is both boring and blissful. It's winter, and except for a bakery and a mini-mart, the town is shut down-no tavernas, no museums, no other foreigners, as far as I can tell, but me. I was given a 3 month residency at The House of Literature in Lefkes, a small mountain town on the island of Paros in Greece.
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