At the heart of A Dream of Kings is Leonidas Matsoukas, operator of the Pindar Counseling Service ("Solutions provided for all problems of life and love"), proponent of wildly creative get-rich-quick schemes, passionately loving husband and father, equally ardent lover of the beautiful bakeshop proprietor Anthoula, incurable gambler, and incorrigible fighter. Matsoukas is a fiercely proud Greek immigrant with a zest for the temptations of his new home on Halsted Street in 1960s Chicago. He dreams of conquering the city but the tragic illness of his young son Stavros pits him against the larger opponent of fate. By turns comic and heartbreaking, A Dream of Kings combines the power of classical myth - a man raging against the gods - with the vitality, emotion, and joyous ebb and flow of our all-too-human lives. "The gods have chosen you for eternal disaster," Matsoukas's friend Cicero tells him, "but you take every act that has been prepared for your punishment and turn it into some kind of triumph." A Dream of Kings was first published in 1966. It was a New York Times best seller, translated into twelve languages, and made into a 1969 feature film starring Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas. This new edition includes a foreword from Dan Georgakas, retired director of the Greek American Studies Project at the Center for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at Queens College-CUNY, USA and editor of the Journal of Hellenic Diaspora.

Roger Ebert wrote the foreword to this collection of 35 in-depth interviews with the world's leading filmmakers and critics, from Fonda to Fassbinder, from Canby to Costa-Gavras, from Sarris to Sayles. Cineaste, America's leading magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, has become known for its in-depth interviews with filmmakers and film critics of international stature. The best of these interviews are now collected in this volume. The interviews: Constantin Costa-Gavras, Glauber Rocha, Miguel Littin, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ousmane Sembene, Elio Petri, Dusan Makavejev; Gillo Pontecorvo; Alain Tanner, Jane Fonda, Francesco Rosi, Lina Wertmuller, Roberto Rossellini, Tomas Gutierrez Alea, Gordon Parks, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Howard Lawson, Paul Schrader, Agnes Varda, Bertrand Tavernier, Andrew Sarris, Bruce Gilbert, Jorge Semprun, Vincent Canby, John Berger, Andrzej Wajda, John Sayles, Krzysztof Zanussi, Molly Haskell, Budd Schulberg, Satyajit Ray. The unique value of these interviews will be the comments by the filmmakers on the crucial artistic and political decisions confronted in the making of their films, many of which have become classics of their kind. The filmmakers and critics talk about their own development, films which influenced their work, and the continuing controversies and alternative approaches in filmmaking. They take on their critics and their own previous positions with a clarity and forcefulness to be expected from some of the leading practitioners of their art. The interviews are introduced with a foreword by Roger Ebert, television commentator and critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. Mr. Ebert discusses the relation of art and politics and some of the common perspectives which unite filmmakers of different cultures and of diverse artistic and political temperaments. Among the subjects of these wide-ranging talks are: the choice between popular and experimental forms of narrative; the filmmaker's responsibility to society; blacks and women in the movies; the rise of third world filmmaking; Hollywood's left and progressives; the conditions of filmmaking in different societies; the challenges of independent production; different forms of censorship, from the U.S. to Poland; trends in criticism and auteur theory to feminism; the power of the reviewer.