Feeding the doves

Having left Greece in her youth, Stella Pierides, the author of “Feeding the Doves”, returns to the country of her birth through a collection of stories that lie at the heart of Greek identity. About the Book: Greece has been in the headlines for a very long time. Recently, the headlines have been gloomy and negative, the country facing some of its most difficult years. Against this background, “Feeding the Doves” explores recurrent elements of the Greek psyche, tracing them back to challenges posed by the country’s history, culture, and environment. The widow, the old loner, the refugee, the immigrant, the young, the writer, the expatriate, tell us their stories, touching upon themes at the heart of Greek being: Love and loss, civil war, immigration and diaspora, emigration, poverty, religion, history and catastrophe, and above all, the will to survive. “What I admire here are the shining moments of revelation, of truths large and small bursting through the lives and memories of these characters. So many characters, and so rich!” —John Wentworth Chapin Founding Editor, 52 250 and A Baker's Dozen “Stories to surprise and entertain, to wake and calm, to wrench and elate, to tell the Greek story, past and present, and everyone’s story.” -—Michael Dylan Welch, poet, writer, and editor/publisher of Press Here books About the Author: Stella Pierides is a writer and poet born in Athens, Greece. She now divides her time between Neusaess, Germany and London, England. In her heart, she lives somewhere on the Aegean coast. She is married and has two adult daughters. Stella trained as a psychotherapist and worked at a crisis center and in private practice in London, UK for many years. More recently, Stella gained an MA in Literature, with Distinction, from the Open University, UK. For the last few years, she focuses on writing prose and poetry. Stella has had work published in numerous print and online journals and anthologies. She has coedited and contributed to Even Paranoids Have Enemies (Routledge, 1998) and Beyond Madness (JKP, 2002). Recent books: In the Garden of Absence (Fruit Dove Press, 2012 - poetry); The Heart and Its Reasons (Fruit Dove Press, 2014 - short stories); Taubenfüttern (German translation of Feeding the Doves, Fruit Dove Press, 2015 - Kurzgeschichten).