1973 "First edition" stated; translated by Barbara Bray; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishers, New York; hardbound in blue boards with copper lettering along spine; minor soiling to covers and previous owner's stamp inside cover; unmarked pages in quite good condition; no dust jacket.
 
Kirkus Review -
The fact that Vassilikos is the author of the novel Z will assume an audience for this slight collection of short stories, which begins and ends with thriller sketches, and presents in between a pale gallery of Greek exiles meeting other exiles, missing Greece, falling into degrees of demoralization. The opening item is a not very artful workup of a successful kidnapping of an American colonel in Greece (the unrealized irony centers around the colonel's job as guardian of the PX commissary). The last one is a psycho-mystery about the suicide/murder of a Greek activist in Scandinavia, a sort of film scenario with little suspense or depth. As for the slices of exile life in the middle, they resemble fragments of an unconceptualized novel, mostly lacking in the point required of first-rate short stories; they remain attenuated anecdotes or mood pieces, with the exception of a couple of focused portraits of an invalid Greek worker-exile who hangs around a hippy ""oriental goods"" shop for the nostalgic sounds of the sheepbells on its door, and of a romantic expatriate who scares a friend's Spanish maid with his desire to discuss their mutual histories. Vassilikos seems to slide along on the surface of things -- this is also true of his non-fictional pieces in Outside the Walls (to follow in this issue) -- and reflects the predicament of the exile without giving artistic life to it.