Ρέα Γαλανάκη

"In I Shall Sign as Loui, the renowned Greek writer Rhea Galanaki has given us a powerful, passionate story of the life of a historical figure told through fictional letters. Loui has grown up in western Greece and has been educated in Italy. He befriends Victor Hugo and Edgar Quinet, travels in the same circles as Karl Marx, and participates in the Italian underground and student uprisings in support of Garibaldi. Loui's letters to Louisa cover a life spent traveling across Europe, from Patras and the Ionian Islands to Italy and Paris, and his experiences in the revolutionary movements of mid-nineteenth-century Europe and America. With lyrical, haunting prose, Galanaki blends fiction and reality to tell a story as rich in emotion as it is in history."--Jacket.

"Eleni, or Nobody is based on the life of Greece's first woman painter, Eleni Altamura-Boukoura, who adopted the guise of a man in order to study in Italy. She married the renowned nineteenth-century Italian painter Francesco Saverio Altamura and had two children with him before he abandoned the family, leaving Eleni to return to Athens to work as a painter. When illness and tragedy befell her, Eleni retreated to her family's house on the Greek island of Spetses to live out her remaining years in isolation, amid rumors of madness and witchcraft. Rhea Galanaki's ingenious and evocative retelling of this woman's story centers on what it means to be a woman and an artist in a region struggling to develop its own identity as a nation."--Jacket.