The essays in Ruin link meditations on teaching, friendship,
motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language
of politics and advertising, Occupy Wall Street, and the Parthenon
Marbles into a relentless interrogation of identity and loss.
Kalfopoulou's Athens and New York are twinned sites of perpetual
dislocation, palimpsests of political, economic, cultural--and
personal--crisis. The refugee, the immigrant, the fragmented 'I' charted
in these essays--all are studies in exilic living, pilgrims wandering
the wreckage of late capitalism.