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.

The first collection of the short stories of Harry Mark Petrakis was nominated for a National book Award in Fiction, establishing him as a master of the form. Revealing commentaries by the author introduce each story in this collection. In "The Passing of the Ice," Polish icemen suffer the fate of some great doomed Greek line. In "The Song of Rhodanthe" a fleeting vision of love flowers within a grim social prison. In "The journal of a Wife Beater" an insufferable chauvinist male discovers to his horror and bodily peril, that is wife is younger and stronger than he is.

From the ageless elements of great drama-love and hate, fear and home, war and vengeance, Petrakis has spun a modern classic. "IN THE LAND OF MORNING" centers around two love affairs, one youthful and poetic, the other a seething, sensual mature love that grows to be all-consuming. It is the story, as well, of a strange, driven family seen in a new light by a son newly returned from war, weary of killing and death, but finding he has not left these behind him. Confrontation and the haunted past threaten his love and his hope for the future.