I'm delighted to share the finished cover for the North American edition of Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece, which will be published by Godine on April 14th. With huge thanks to Nicole Caputo for the absolutely beautiful design and for having the brilliant idea of placing Edward Lear's illustration of a … Continue reading Lifelines: North American edition
I first met Matina Galati in a grove of extraordinary juniper trees on a limestone mountain above the Prespa lakes where I live in northern Greece. That day, I’d been walking with the Hungarian gardener and botanist Máté Tálas and two friends of his when Matina arrived from Athens to join the group for the … Continue reading Artwork for Lifelines: Interview with Matina Galati
The steppe spilled away into the distance, marsh-green and silvered with pooled rain. The morning air was cold and misted, and our breath turned to fog when we spoke. As clouds sealed the plain with grey light, the land seemed eerily still until a hare sprang to its feet. From its concealing flat crouch against … Continue reading The Bugling Sky
“Whoever raises the great stones sinks.” ~ Giorgos Seferis, “Mycenae” Like a river on a map, I trace the sinuous line with my finger as it meanders over the stone. The crystallised vein is rust-orange in a shadowy white expanse. The marble is rougher than I’d imagined, more like a sheet of compressed salt, baked … Continue reading The Marble Shore
For centuries men cloistered here, monastic, remote, alone. Men who’d shed some of the world as a way of contemplating its essence, stricter in their spiritual devotion to it. At the edge of this high mountain lake, they lived lives pared down to clear symmetry, in the way a piece of bone is carved slowly … Continue reading The Stone Coast
Julian Hoffman 