Text: English, Greek (translation)

Journeying: Travels in Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem and Cyprus

Travel

Nikos Kazantzakis

Africa

Little. Brown and Company

Little, Brown, and Co.

Zorba is the sort of who should have lived for 1000 years.

Zorba the Greek

Literature & Fiction

Literary

A BALLANTINE BOOK

The Greek elders of Lycovrissi gather to select principals from the village for the Passion Play, given every seven years at Easter. Among the various villagers, Manolios, the meek shepherd, is chosen to play Christ, and Katerina, a widow who had closed herself off to men after the death of her husband, is chosen to play Mary Magdalen. As this passionate story of savage emotions and primitive religious feeling evolves, the actors begin to change according to their roles in the biblical story. When the Turkish Agha finds his favorite dead in bed, he arrests the village elders and threatens to hang one a day until the murderer is discovered. Manolios, because of a strange dream, believes he must offer himself as sacrifice and confesses to the slaying.

The Greek Passion

Ballantine Books

Kazantzakis's first published work, in its first English translation and accompanied by an early artistic manifesto, centers on an artist whose infatuation with his model becomes a torment from which only murder can release him

Serpent and Lily: A Novella, with a Manifesto: The Sickness of the Age

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Internecine strife in a village in the Epirus during the Greek civil war of the late 1940s. Many of the villagers, including Captain Drakos, the son of the local priest, Father Yanaros, have taken to the mountains and joined the rebels. It is Holy Week and, with murder, death and destruction every day, Father Yanaros feels that he himself is bearing the sins of the world.

Fratricides

Contemporary

Faber & Faber UK / Distributed by Greece in Print

This distinguished novelist, poet, and translator was born in Crete and educated in Athens, Germany, Italy, and Paris, where he studied philosophy. He found time to write some 30 novels, plays, and books on philosophy, to serve his government, and to travel widely. He ran the Greek ministry of welfare from 1919 to 1921 and was minister of state briefly in 1945. A political activist, he spent his last years in France and died in Germany. Kazantzakis's character Zorba has been called "one of the great characters of modern fiction," in a novel that "reflects Greek exhilaration at its best" (TLS). A film version of 1965, starring Anthony Quinn, made Kazantzakis widely known in the West. Intensely religious, he imbued his novels with the passion of his own restless spirit, "torn between the active and the contemplative, between the sensual and the aesthetic, between nihilism and commitment" (Columbia Encyclopedia). Judas, the hero of The Last Temptation of Christ (1951) is asked by Christ to betray him so that he can fulfill his mission through the crucifixion. For this book Kazantzakis was excommunicated from the Greek Orthodox Church. The Fratricides, Kazantzakis's last novel, portrays yet another religious hero, a priest caught between Communists and Royalists in the Greek Civil War.

The Last Temptation of Christ

Faber and Faber Limited

This is Kazantzakis's modern "Iliad". Set in late-19th-century Crete, when a new uprising takes place to rival those of 1854, 1866 and 1878. In the village of Megalokastro, a Cretan resistance fighter named Captain Michales, is matched by the Turkish bey, his blood-brother.

Freedom and Death

FABER

Report to Greco.

This autobiographical novel is one of the last things written by Kazantzakis before he died in 1957. It paints a vivid picture of his childhood in Crete, and then steadily grows into a spiritual quest that takes him to Italy, Jerusalem, Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Russia.

Report to Greco

Faber&Faber

God's Pauper is an imaginative retelling of the life of St Francis.Kazantzakis' writings are an anguished expression of the eternal struggle between the spirit and flesh, and he uses the story of St Francis to draw us into the Maelstrom.The story is dramatically unfolded to us by the Saint's constant companion, Frate Leone, who takes us through agonies of physical and spiritual humiliation. We accompany the Saint before the Pope to establish his Brotherhood; to Damietta and the Saracen armies; and in solitary vigils on Mount Alvernia. The minutest and the mightiest elements of nature form the backcloth to the drama of events. Hate, compassion, jealousy and fear are among the principal ingredients in the drama, fused together with infinite subtlety.

God's Pauper: St Francis of Assisi

History

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nikos Kazantzakis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nikos Kazantzakis

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nikos Kazantzakis. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Journeying: Travels in Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem and Cyprus

Journeying: Travels in Italy, Egypt, Sinai, Jerusalem and Cyprus

Zorba the Greek

The Greek Passion

Serpent and Lily: A Novella, with a Manifesto: The Sickness of the Age

Fratricides

The Last Temptation of Christ

Freedom and Death

Report to Greco

God's Pauper: St Francis of Assisi