Passions in Literature
Kastaniotis Publications & Hellenic Authors’ Society | 2016
After the very successful publication of Loci of Literature, the Hellenic Authors’ Society continues with a second volume entitled Passions in Literature. One hundred authors record and rethink, through their own unpublished or published texts, in newspapers and literary magazines, passions of every kind. They record and rethink passions secret and revealed, unconfessed obsessions and habits from which humans both suffer and find nourishment, in which we find both consolation and inspiration, and in which we fester and are confined. They write about passions that, at times, offer to human beings an illusory expansion of the senses and an occasional vastness of emotions, while at times they just plunge us into a fictitious private cosmos, relieving us temporarily of our insufficiencies, as well as of our existential anxiety. Insecurities, a flattening everyday life, the anxiety of death, loneliness… to all these things a passion seems to be a temporary remedy.
After all, all the narratives human beings have to offer revolve around passions; passions that they describe, express, try to understand or tame.
From ancient mythologies to the holy books of religions, to contemporary literature, which now finds extremely personal ways to touch upon the destructive imprint of our origin, which can bring into the light of the simple electric lamp – at times seeking Another Light – the bleeding hand, the disfigured self, and which creates literature by daring to record, passions have always been the current of narrative.