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Little Infamies: Stories. Panos Karnezis

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Little Infamies: Stories Panos Karnezis. djvu ebook Publisher: Picador Language: English Page: 288 ISBN: 0312421540, 9780312421540

From Publishers Weekly

Set in a backwater Greek village where a broken engagement can end in murder, the stories in Karnezis's debut collection are richly ironic antimorality tales. The characters are miscreants and dreamers: a priest so desperate to win the faith of his congregation that he stages a religious hoax; a doctor with hidden aspirations and a barkeep who knows all of the town's secrets. "Funeral of Stones" recounts the tale of mistreated twins whose father blames them for their mother's gruesome death in childbirth. They run away and plot a brilliant revenge against their father, infecting him with a deadly disease. What they don't reckon on is a miraculous antidote-antibiotics. In "Another Day on Pegasus," a bus driver nearly plows his vehicle into a rocky gulch, distracted by lustful fantasies about one of his passengers. In "Medical Ethics," the aging village doctor finishes a gynecological exam ("his mind was all that time occupied with the answers to the crossword he had left unfinished") only to be surprised by an impromptu marriage proposal from his virginal teenage patient. What's best about Karnezis's stories is not their sly plot twists or colorful portraits of village life (though these are good) but the deadpan conversations and monologues, alive with the author's subversive wit. The village doctor politely inquires about the teenager's stepfather. She politely answers, "He's still suffering from constipation. He says the medicines you've given him do him no good, and one of these days he's going to kill you."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From

These fierce, twisted, and darkly funny stories are set in an unnamed Greek village, in what might be called the eternal present. Karnezis, a Greek writing in English, has a sharp, unsentimental eye for contemporary Greek life, while deftly adding intimations of the pagan past, as when a centaur in a travelling circus demands a raise. The connecting thread here is the spectacular untrustworthiness of the village's inhabitants, who are as wily as Odysseus: Father Yerasimo, the deeply pragmatic priest, engineers a miracle in front of a visiting bishop to impress his congregation; the one-armed Dr. Panteleon finds a loophole in the Hippocratic oath.
Copyright © 2005
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.