In the "Secretly dreaming of a magic picture" the hero confesses: "I ought to admit that graffiti, which I sometimes despised as a fringe art, had inspired at least one of my novels and the cause had been a wiggly line! But now it was, for once, the black hole of a stygian vulva, not of the black holes in space that have been so much talked about lately which could, given the appropriate insemination, constitute the basic material for an exciting story, provided that..."

• But why is the young and promising short story writer unable to "ejaculate" as a writer?
• Furthermore, how come a virgin like Chloe, immortalised in Jules Lesebvre's famous painting, caused such a furore and a stream of mysterious scandals over the past one hundred years?
• Which "Portents and Monsters" is the little village-boy trying to decode behind Poppy's hermetically closed bedroom door, with the strange around midnight noises which are reminiscent of primitive rituals?
• Why do the adults of a household resort to a "Most macabre lie" to explain to their little brat the mystery of death, by saying: "the dead never scream! When you grow up you will understand..."?
• What was killed in the summer of '65, when, "With the first drop of rain", when the atmosphere got damp and had an earthly smell about it?
• Which "Pious hopes" remain unfulfilled for the elderly hero of this story who, despite having discovered Franz's America and the city Ghent of an eccentric writer, an aesthete, with the peculiar name Stoppakius Papenguss, continues to dream of a journey to the faraway and remote Australia of his childhood dreams?
• Why, in the "Justification of happiness" is the difference between cheerful and tearful only a small step, just one small sound?
• Which "Relocation" forces a young Greek-Australian youngster to think twice about the advice he was constantly bombarded with since childhood: "Be proud that you were born a Greek"?
• What does a young Greek migrant teenager have in common with the funny astronauts who are jumping around like drunks on the Moon's dance floor?
• In which "Black holes" of the universe has the repatriated Greek young man been lost that make him feel like an "extra-terrestrial"?

The writer of this heart-racing collection of short stories, in his attempts to piece together the puzzle of life and art, exclaims through his narrator: "Sooner or later we get to know the monsters. Some of the portents, however, are destined to remain for ever unseen, secret, enigmatic..."

A relentlessly daring, nightmarish but nevertheless fascinating plunge into the deep waters of the world of the Greeks in exile, where the doubly erotic pain of uprooting and homesickness blends harmoniously with the day of no return and the painful hedonism of writing. Eighteen original chronicles of narrative apprenticeship, tender derision and pious and irreverent hopes from the pen of a craftsman prose writer whom Eleftherotypia has acclaimed as "one of the most significant intellectuals of the Greek Diaspora".

Publisher: N. & S. Batsioulas
ISBN13: 978-960-89288-3-1	Pages: 180
Publ. date: March/2007	Cover: Soft
Size: 14x21