RUIN

The linked personal essays in Ruin weave together meditations on teaching, friendship, motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language of politics and advertising, Occupy Wall Street, the Parthenon Marbles, and a host of other subjects into a blistering interrogation of identity and loss. Kalfopoulou's Athens and New York are twinned sites of perpetual dislocation, palimpsests of political, economic, cultural—and personal—crisis. The refugee, the immigrant, the fragmented ‘I' charted in these essays—all are studies in exilic living, fugitives from history, pilgrims wandering the wreckage of late capitalism.