A novel of friendship and connectivity from Chowdhury Award-winning writer, Christos Ikonomou, Greece's "most original and perceptive chronicler" (The New York Times)
On the heels of two masterful story collections translated by Karen Emmerich, Tell Her trains an eye to a young courier in Athens who is writing down the world. Her days are spun with miraculous sights. Doors give way to rooms full of eye-shaped objects, or to cars parked right in the kitchen. She delivers a relic and helps glue it to a cane. She takes a pillow to a woman who asks if she can stay a while, just to know someone's there. True boundaries are invisible, the courier says, exchanging parcels for a piece of someone's loneliness, boredom, joy.
Like a shock of light through the novel comes Lena, the courier's hairdresser best friend, who rides in her van each Monday. Practical where the courier is porous, Lena tapes her friend's notes to the dashboard and ticks through the week's wonders. It's with Lena that the courier sets out on her most difficult route-the delivery of a young woman's urn to a remote mountain village.
Christos Ikonomou is an anatomist of Greek life. He levels the cosmic, the weird, the mundane, and creates an urban litany. Reading Tell Her is like gazing at a distant city, awed by its vastness. We're asked to slow down and unfortify ourselves-to make room for the pain of others.
Autorentext
Christos Ikonomou was born in Athens in 1970. He has published four collections of short stories, two of which have been published by Archipelago Books-Something Will Happen, You'll See (2010) and Good Will Come From The Sea (2014). Something Will Happen, You'll See won Greece's prestigious State Prize for Best Short-Story Collection and became the most reviewed Greek book of 2011. Ikonomou is the inaugural recipient of the 2022 Chowdhury Prize and one of the 2022 winners of the O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. His stories have been featured in The Yale Review, Guernica, and Harper's Magazine, among others. His books have been translated into ten languages. Italy's La Repubblica has called him "the Greek Faulkner."
Translator bio:
Karen Emmerich's translation of Miltos Sachtouris for Archipelago was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and her translation of Yannis Ritsos's Diaries of Exile with Edmund Keeley won the 2014 PEN Literary Award. She also translated Christos Ikonomou's Something Will Happen, You'll See and Good Will Come From the Sea. She teaches at Princeton University.