As a writer and philosopher, Nikos Kazantzakis struggled all his life with existential questions, once spending several months in a monastery in an attempt to attain a closer relationship with God. His relentless quest to understand the nature of life through travel, extensive reading, and constant conversation with a diverse array of compatriots ultimately led Kazantzakis to compose this book of "spiritual exercises" meant to help the reader achieve harmony between the countervailing human impulses toward an immortality-seeking asceticism and toward a more nihilistic and materialist view of death. As with all Kazantzakis’s philosophical works, The Saviors of God sheds light on a mind uniquely suited to a nuanced examination of what it means to be human, and establishes a hopeful vision for a dazzlingly syncretic approach to spiritual life.

Like The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis is a fictionalized biography of a widely venerated Christian figure: Francis of Assisi, whose renunciation of his young man’s life of leisure and founding of a religious order dedicated to living in poverty and sharing the Gospels with all living things profoundly influence the ways in which Christians the world over worship and give service to their god even today. Recounted in Nikos Kazantzakis’s striking prose through the eyes of the saint’s brother, Leo, the life of Saint Francis shines in these pages as a heroic example of inspirational leadership and boundless love for God and all His creatures.

The life of Nikos Kazantzakis—the author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ—was as colorful and eventful as his fiction. And nowhere is his life revealed more fully or surprisingly than in his letters. Edited and translated by Kazantzakis scholar Peter Bien, this is the most comprehensive selection of Kazantzakis's letters in any language. One of the most important Greek writers of the twentieth century, Kazantzakis (1883–1957) participated in or witnessed some of the most extraordinary events of his times, including both world wars and the Spanish and Greek civil wars. As a foreign correspondent, an official in several Greek governments, and a political and artistic exile, he led a relentlessly nomadic existence, living in France, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Soviet Union, and England. He visited the Versailles Peace Conference, attended the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, interviewed Mussolini and Franco, and briefly served as a Greek cabinet minister—all the while producing a stream of novels, poems, plays, travel writing, autobiography, and translations. The letters collected here touch on almost every aspect of Kazantzakis's rich and tumultuous life, and show the genius of a man who was deeply attuned to the artistic, intellectual, and political events of his times.

The epics of ancient Greece and Rome are unique in that many went unfinished, or if they were finished, remained open to further narration that was beyond the power, interest, or sometimes the life-span of the poet. Such incompleteness inaugurated a tradition of continuance and closure in their reception. Brill’s Companion to Prequels, Sequels, and Retellings of Classical Epic explores this long tradition of continuing epics through sequels, prequels, retellings and spin-offs. This collection of essays brings together several noted scholars working in a variety of fields to trace the persistence of this literary effort from their earliest instantiations in the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer to the contemporary novels of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood.

First published in 1946, "Zorba the Greek," is, on one hand, the story of a Greek working man named Zorba, a passionate lover of life, the unnamed narrator who he accompanies to Crete to work in a lignite mine, and the men and women of the town where they settle. On the other hand it is the story of God and man, The Devil and the Saints; the struggle of men to find their souls and purpose in life and it is about love, courage and faith.

A stimulating excursion into the sunnier areas of the human spirit.

Literature and theology constantly (de)construct each other. Suggesting that this (de)constructive assignment is one that cannot but be "in process itself," Middleton returns to it throughout his study.".

Owens (religious studies, Canterbury Christ Church U. College) seeks to clarify the philosophical and religious views of playwright, journalist, and novelist Kazantzakis (1883-1957), arguing that his religious philosophy led him to transcend both communism and nihilism enroute to a union with god. Annotation (c) Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (bookn