The Durrell Library of Corfu has inherited stock of some titles published by the Durrell School of Corfu, and copies are available for purchase.
Payment may be made via PayPal (we will issue an invoice) or by cash to:
Durrell Library of Corfu, PO Box 94, Corfu 49100, Greece
In June 2019 the Durrell Library of Corfu published
Lawrence Durrell’s novella The Magnetic Island
in a special limited edition of 124 copies which were presented to participants at
“ISLANDS OF THE MIND”
featuring the original text and a parallel translation into Greek by Vera Konidari
This edition was numbered 1-100 and a-w (in the Greek alphabet)
An additional 100 copies (unnumbered) are now offered for sale
at the price of 30 euros plus postage.
The cover features typography by Nancy Durrell, who also contributed three drawings, one of which is reproduced below.
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Lawrence Durrell: the Mindscape
by Richard Pine
This is the second edition of Pine’s book, originally published by Macmillan Press in 1994; the revised edition was published by the Durrell School in 2005. It’s available to read on this website, but anyone who wants to read it in hard copy can do so.
This is the only work, to date, which comprehensively studies all Lawrence Durrell’s work, both published and unpublished. Pine had unlimited access to Durrell’s private papers and was actively assisted by Durrell, who had approved of Pine’s previous study, The Dandy and the Herald: manners, mind and morals from Brummell to Durrell (Macmillan Press, 1988).
Durrell commended Pine’s study of his work: “The best unpacking of my literary baggage that I have heard”.
“Thorough and intelligent in his appraisal of Durrell’s work and its literary context” – Times Literary Supplement
“The most comprehensive attempt to delineate Durrell’s intellectual and artistic growth” – Ian MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell: a biography
Copies are available, price 40 euros, to include post & packaging.
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Judith by Lawrence Durrell
edited with an introduction by Richard Pine
This previously unpublished novel, which provided the basic script for the film Judith (1966), starring Sophia Loren in the title role, with Jack Hawkins and Peter Finch, exists in several versions. 
To celebrate Durrell’s centenary in 2012, the Durrell School published a limited, numbered, collector’s edition, a few copies of which are still available.
Richard Pine’s extensive introduction sets the scene of the diplomatic and military manoeuvres taking place as the British mandate to administer Palestine draws to a close with the United Nations recognition of the state of Israel; against this background, Durrell sets two love stories and the narrative of a Jewish-Arab friendship which is rebutted by the lesson of history.
We are prohibited, by the terms of our contract with the Estate of Lawrence Durrell, to offer this title for sale, due to its subsequent publication by Open Road (USA) in both a print edition and as an e-book.
However, we can make copies available to subscribers to the Durrell Library of Corfu – please send an e-mail enquiry to durrelllibrarycorfu@gmail.com
- “All praise to Richard Pine and the Durrell School of Corfu … The author’s prose shines through thickets of propaganda… Durrell understood the British in Palestine… an all-too-accurate account of the last days of the mandate … As a narrative of Jewish wartime suffering, Durrell comes close to grandeur… Read on” – Robert Fisk, The Independent.
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Autumn Gleanings: Corfu Memoirs and Poems, by Theodore Stephanides
This collection of memoirs by Theodore Stephanides 
is published for the first time in its entirety, and is accompanied by a previously unpublished collection of poems from which the book takes its title, Autumn Gleanings, penned by the author in old age. Stephanides’ interests in science are reflected in his poems which complement his extensive work as a translator from the Greek of Kostes Palamas. The memoirs relate to the years in Corfu 1935-39 and Stephanides’ subsequent meetings with Lawrence Durrell in Egypt in 1944. The volume concludes with a rare but characteristic example of Stephanides’ humour in a skit on Lawrence Durrell entitled ‘Bishop’s Move’. The memoir constitutes a unique insight into Lawrence Durrell’s life in Corfu. The work is introduced with a biographical sketch by Richard Pine and a selected bibliography of Stephanides’ manifold publications.
Copies are available from Colenso Books – colensobooks@gmail.com – price £8.50stg + p&p.
The Durrell Log
a chronology of the life and times of Lawrence Durrell
by Brewster Chamberlin
A third, completely revised, edition of this indispensable work has been published by Colenso Books (UK) and is available from them – colensobooks@gmail.com
Sweet-voiced Sappho
poems of Sappho and other Ancient Greek authors translated into English verse by THEODORE STEPHANIDES
Colenso Books, 2015, price £9.50, available from Colenso Books
In this dual-language volume Anthony Hirst has brought together for publication – first publication in nearly every case – all of Theodore Stephanides’ translations of Ancient Greek poetry, consisting chiefly of consummate examples of personal or choral lyric created by Sappho in the seventh or sixth century BC. Stephanides, who is associated with the island of Corfu, off the Greek mainland, echoes the work of Sappho of Lesbos, an island off the coast of Asia Minor, not far from luxurious Sardis, the Lydian capital (which figures in these poems). Known later as the “Tenth Muse”, Sappho was to lyric poetry what Homer was to epic: while Homer sang of men and the slaughter of war, Sappho’s songs are of beauty, women and nature; desire, jealousies and rapture; youth, loves and life; but also of old age, memories and death. We have little or no knowledge of Sappho’s music, vocal or as played on her lyre, but the virtuosity of the ancient world’s pre-eminent female composer and singer of songs still shines through in these glowing versions.
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Nostos: Proceedings of the Durrell School of Corfu 2002-2005
This is a collection of lectures delivered at the Durrell School 2002-2005, by:
John Brandon (Asia Foundation, Washington): “America and Asia”; Elemer Hankiss (Hungarian Academy of Sciences): “Symbols of Destruction”; Brewster Chamberlin (Durrell School): “Into the Volcano: European Culture in the Inter-Bellum Period 1919-1939”; Ersi Sotiropoulos (author of Zigzag Through the Bitter Orange Trees): “On Becoming a Writer”; Yiorgis Yatromanolakis (Athens University and novelist): “What Does it Mean to be a Greek Writer in the Modern World?”; Apostolos Doxiadis (film-writer and author of Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture): “What’s in a Name? Fragments of a Writer’s Continuing Personal Odyssey Between Two Languages”; Lynne Alice (Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia): “The Planet Dreaming: Dead Lands, Destiny and Desire”; Mustapha Marouchi (Louisiana State University): “Thus is Dislocation Figured in the Placeless Place”; David Newman (Ben Gurion University, Israel): “The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our ‘Borderless’ World”; Richard Pine (Durrell School): “Lawrence Durrell at the Border(s)”; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia University): “Translating into English”.
Copies are available, price 15 euros, to include post & packaging.
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Four further titles, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK) on behalf of the Durrell School, can also be purchased direct from the publisher:
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Creativity, Madness and Civilisation
edited by Richard Pine (2007)
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/creativity-madness-and-civilisation-20
Contributors: John Price, “A Creative Myth: Madness and the Creation of New Belief Systems”; Steve Blundell, “Creativity and Reactive Depression”; Raymond Marchionni, “Robert Schumann: Original Among Music’s Romantics”; Gozde Onaran, “Donnie Darko: A Psychotic Saviour”; Anna Lillios, “Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Chapter: Depression, Old Age and the Decline of Creativity”; Jocelyn Slovak, “A Legitimate Incomprehensibility: Mrs Dalloway and the ‘Insane Truth'”; K J Verwaayen, “The P(r)ose of Madness: Subversion/Containment and/as Cryptomimesis in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper“; Sheri Goh, “‘Words for Dr Y’: Anne Sexton’s ‘Doctor’ Poems”; Sunten Gurac, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”; Kiki Benzon, “Darkness Legible, Unquiet Lines: Mood Disorders and the Fiction of David Foster Wallace”; James R Newell, “The Wisdom of Intoxication: Love and Madness in the Poetry of Hafiz of Shiraz”; Gareth Sion Jenkins, “Reality: A ‘Relatively’ Private Anagram”; Gavin Parkinson, “‘Very Stupid Stuff’: Making Sense of Adolf Wolfli”; Deanna Petherbridge, “In Touch and Out of Mind: The Psychodynamics of Obsessive Drawing”; Andreas Anastasiou, “Art and Human Personality: have we gone too far in our efforts to ‘psychologise’ artists through their work?”
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The Literatures of War
edited by Richard Pine and Eve Patten (2008)
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/literatures-of-war-20
Contributors: Anthony Stevens: “What is War and Why do We Do It?”; Eve Patten, “‘Why Not War Writers?’: Considering the Cultural Front”; Desmond Traynor, “Making History and Making it Up: On the Reliability of Herodotus, and Subsequent Historians”; Anthony Hirst, “His Best and His Worst: the Second World War Poetry of Angelos Sikelianos”; Richard Pine, “War, Agon and the Greek Literary Imagination”; Cynthia Wachtell, “‘Battles No More Shall Be’: Herman Melville’s War Writings”; Jennifer Kewley Draskau, “Written Between the Lines on Devil’s Island: the ‘Stobsiade’ Anthology 1917. Great War Internment Literature from the Isle of Man”; Joanna Scutts, “The ‘War Books Boom’: Resisting and Rewriting First World War Commemoration”; Turgay Bayandir, “War-Broken Masculinities and the Search for Healing in The Sun Also Rises and Home to Harlem“; Gerald Dawe, “‘Earth Voices Whispering’: On Editing an Irish Anthology of War Poetry”; Tony Curtis, “After the First Death: Literature and Wales in the Second World War”; Raymond Marchionni, “Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand“; William M Skoog, “Musical Settings of War Texts in Two Twentieth-Century British Choral Works”; Anne R Zahlan, “Avignon Preserved: Conquest and Liberation in Lawrence Durrell’s Constance“; Marie-Christine Veldeman, “War, the Most Dramatic Manifestation of Entropy in Lawrence Durrell’s Avignon Quintet“; Jan Lensen, “Strategies of Contest: Collaboration and Repression in Flemish Prose Fiction about the Second World War”; Steven Jacobi, “From Year Zero to Year One: Some Questions of Style and Tone Regarding World War Two and the Evolution of German Remembering”; Jim Potts, “Representing Britain in Times of Hostilities”; Sudha Shastri, “Circularity, Invention and Catch-22: Establishing Value Within an Iterative Narrative Mode”; Christina Meyer, “‘It’s a Rerun: Nothing’s Authentic Any More’: Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country“; Mark Rawlinson, “After War: Writing About World War in a Post-War Era?”; Ilka Saal, “Making it Real? Theatre in Times of Virtual Warfare”; Sanna Dhahir, “Images of the Fall in Bushra Al-Bustani’s ‘Andalusian Songs for the Wounds of Iraq'”; David Radavich, “War Thoughts”; Dorothea Melvin, “From War … To Peace”.
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The Ionian Islands: Aspects of their History and Culture
edited by Anthony Hirst and Patrick Sammon (2014); introduction by Peter Mackridge
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/the-ionian-islands
Contributors: Maria Leontsini, “The Ionian Islands During the Byzantine Period: an Overview of their History and Monuments”; Robert Holland, “Via or Vita? British Experience in the Modern Mediterranean”; A A D Seymour, “How to Work the System and Thrive: Ionians and Pseudo-Ionians in the Levant, 1815-1864”; Jim Potts, “The Souliots in Souli and Corfu and the Strange Case of Photos Tzavellas”; George N Leontsinis, “The Ionian Islands and the Greek Revolution”; A A D Seymour, “The Least Known Lord High Commissioner: A Note on James Stewart Mackenzie”; Eleni Calligas, “‘A History of the Peasants … Printed in Gaol’ and Other Unknown Texts by the 1849 Kephalonian Rebels Imprisoned at Argostoli”; Sakis Gekas, “‘Thalassovioti’ – Living off the Sea: the Corfu Suburb of Mandouki in the Nineteenth Century”; Jim Potts, “The Fate of the Jewish Communities of Corfu, Zakynthos and Ioannina”; Joseph Wilson, “Using Corfu: the Island in Homer and Apollonius Rhodius”; Benedetta Bessi, “The Ionian Islands in the Liber Insularum of Christoforo Buondelmonti”; Evangelia Skoufari, “Aspects of Religious Coexistence: the Historiography of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches in the Ionian Islands during the Period of Venetian Domination”; Anastasios Koutsouris and Denise-Chloe Alevizou, “Influences and Interactions in Eighteenth-Century Heptanesian Painting”; Athanasia Glycofrydi-Leontsini, “The Reception of Scottish Philosophy in the Ionian Islands during the British Protectorate”; Peter Mackridge, “Seven Bards from Seven Islands: Poetry and Language in the Nineteenth-Century Heptanese”; Kostas Kardamis, “The Music of the Ionian Islands and its Contribution to the Emergence of ‘Greek National Music'”; Adam Smith, “Corfu Canes: Olive-Wood Companions from the Gardens of Alcinous”; J M Q Davies, “Konstantinos Theotokis and Giuseppe di Lampedusa: Literary Responses to Turbulent Times”.
Edited by Richard Pine and Vera Konidari
https://www.cambridgescholars.com/islands-of-the-mind
730 million people—almost 10% of the world’s population—inhabit islands. One quarter of the states represented at the United Nations are islands. Islands constitute almost twenty percent of the total land area of Greece, and exhibit more significant aspects of biodiversity than other global contexts. They are both occasions of triumph and occurrences of catastrophe. Islands are both open and enclosed communities, points of arrival and departure.
Islands exert a fascination for the visitor and generate, in the islander, both positive and negative mindsets. The romantic fallacies about self-sufficiency and insularity of islands are constantly challenged.
This collection of essays by scholars from some of the world’s most compelling islands—Jersey, Ireland, Tasmania, Corfu, Ereikousa, Prince Edward Island, Malta—explores the psychology of islands, islanders and their visitors, the literatures they stimulate, and the scientific, ethical and biogeographical issues they present in an increasingly globalised world.
Corfu, the home of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell in the 1930s, and host to literary and scientific enquiry, is the place where this collection was conceived, and occupies a central place in its discussions.
Further titles of Durrell/Greek interest published by Alyscamp Press and Delos Press
are available from COLENSO BOOKS
Limited edition publications from the Alyscamps Press, Paris
Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels, by Lawrence Durrell edited by Karl Orend (2012)
printed on a single large sheet of thick high quality textured cream paper (32 x 50 cm, with the bottom edge rough-cut), in a limited edition of 50 copies, numbered and signed by the editor; supplied rolled in a rigid cardboard tube. £39.50 (GBP) + postage and packing.
Alyscamps Press is proud to announce the publication, on February 27th 2012, to coincide with the centenary of his birth, of a fine press limited edition of a broadside of one of Lawrence Durrell’s most accomplished poems. On April 13th 1946 a former street prostitute, Marthe Richard, who had become a town councilor, saw the passing of a law named after her, which closed down the French brothels, or maisons, made famous by the photographs of Durrell’s friend Brassaï and his literary hero Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer. In response to this event, Durrell wrote one of his finest poems, a polemic which encompasses his love affair with women, Paris, France, and French culture. The poem is dedicated to Henry Miller and their mutual friend, Greek cultural figure George Katsimbalis, the hero of Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi. Illustrated with a rare photos of Durrell and of Henry Miller with George Katsimbalis.
Paris Revisited, by Anaïs Nin
(New Special Edition, 2012), edited and with an Afterword by Karl Orend; 15.3 x 22.9 cm, 107 pp., a limited edition of 150 copies, numbered and signed by the editor, paperback. £35.50 (GBP) + postage and packing.
Alyscamps Press is proud to announce the publication (April 1st 2012) of a new special edition of Anaïs Nin’s classic chapbook, Paris Revisited (unavailable since 1974). When Anaïs fled Paris in 1939, with war fast approaching, it was with tremendous sadness. She did not know if she would ever return. It was not until 1954 that she saw Paris again. This text recounts her anticipation of her trip and experiences in the City of Light, where she relived memories of the years she once shared with Henry Miller, visited her old haunts, and sought out friends old and new, such as Richard Wright, Ossip Zadkine, and George Whitman, proprietor of the Mistral Bookstore (later Shakespeare & Company). In beautifully evocative prose, Anaïs reflects on the changes in Paris and gives her impressions of the then new generation of resident writers, including the Beats, James Jones, Richard Wright and William Styron. Paris Revisited is followed by an extensive Afterword by leading historian of expatriate Paris, Karl Orend. This traces the story behind the scenes of her visit and reflects on her changing relationship with Henry Miller from the late 1930s to the 1950s. An account is given of the importance of Whitman’s bookstore to Anaïs, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. An Album of nearly fifty rare photographs (several previously unpublished) of places and people mentioned in the text, or connected to Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, supplements Paris Revisited. George Whitman, one of the legendary figures in Paris literary history, died in December 2011. This book also contains an epilogue pointing out his importance in literary Paris and an account of the days surrounding his death. Karl Orend worked with George Whitman for ten years, whilst simultaneously running Alyscamps Press, the most important expatriate publishing venture in Paris of the last fifty years. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Paris literary history.
Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller & the Bluebird of Love, by Karl Orend
(2012) 11.5 x 15.5cm, 16 pp., a limited edition of 50 copies, numbered and signed by the author, paperback. £19.50 (GBP) + postage and packing.
This chapbook, written by leading Henry Miller expert Karl Orend during a stay at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, comprises a poetic reverie on episodes in the lives of Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller and the author. The focus is on the erotic obsession with women in their lives and the constant presence of music as a place of solace. The text offers a key to understanding the pain that their muses inflicted, which became an essential catalyst for their art. Illustrated with a previously unpublished watercolor of Henry Miller. What the critics say: “A masterful, poetic prose that resembles a fugue” (Composer James Brown); “The leading Henry Miller scholar of today” (Greg Heirschberg, Consulting Editor, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal); “The foremost world authority on Henry Miller…” (James M. Decker, author of Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity).
Henry Miller’s Angelic Clown: Reflections on The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, by Karl Orend
(2012); 14.0 x 21.7 cm, 137 pp., a limited edition of 50 copies, numbered and signed by the author, paperback. £27.50 (GBP) + postage and packing.
Henry Miller’s The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder is a parable told through the story of Auguste, a famous clown, and has proved to be one of Miller’s most popular works — reprinted dozens of times in several languages. Karl Orend’s book, Henry Miller’s Angelic Clown, is the only study of this seminal text in Miller’s spiritual journey. Heavily illustrated with artworks that inspired the text and rare photographs, this book explores both the story and it’s historical, artistic and religious context. For the first time its importance can be appreciated, as Orend explores the centrality of clown and circus motifs in Miller’s artwork and writing. Smile is the most revealing example of Miller’s engagement with French art, literature, and performance arts. His parable is linked to artists and writers as diverse as Joan Miro, Georges Rouault, Edgar Degas, Nikolai Gogol, Rainer Maria Rilke, Max Jacob and Georges Seurat. Each of them had strong associations with Paris and/or the circus. Miller was also influenced by the Bible and Koran. By the end of Henry Miller’s Angelic Clown, the reader is left with a completely new appreciation of Henry Miller’s religious spirit — and given the key to understanding the most misunderstood aspect of his writing — the centrality of his spiritual quest. James M. Decker (author of Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity) writes: “Once again, Karl Orend demonstrates why he is the foremost world expert on Henry Miller. In Henry Miller’s Angelic Clown, Orend provides the first extended analysis of Miller’s densely allusive The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. Orend brilliantly unravels the biographical, spiritual, and artistic threads of Miller’s narrative. He allows readers to comprehend, finally, the complexities of a deceptively simple story that has been overlooked by all previous critics and yet forms a major staging post in Henry Miller’s life’s work.”
From the Delos Press, Birmingham
At the Foot of the Acropolis: A Study of Lawrence Durrell’s novels, by Robin Cook
(1995); 14.5 x 21.0 cm, 75 pp., paperback, ISBN 1870380185. £4.50 (GBP) + postage and packing.
Conon’s Songs from Exile: The Limited Edition Publications of Lawrence Durrell, by Peter Baldwin
(1992), in a limited edition of 100 copies; 14.5 x 22.0 cm, 23 pp. (numbered [145]–177), hardback, reprinted from The Private Library, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Winter 1990).£15.00 (GBP) + postage and packing.
An essay on the small-press publications of Lawrence Durrell’s poetry, illustrated with a photograph of Lawrence Durrell in Sommieres, 1986, and facsimiles of pages from rare publications, including a drawing by Sappho Durrell.
Too Far to Hear the Singing: Poems by Lawrence Durrell
Selected and with a Preface by Françoise Kestsman Durrell, in association with Greville Press Pamphlets (2005); 14.0 x 21.5 cm, 32 pp., paperback. £7.50 (GBP) + postage and packing.
Associated publications
Μίκης + Μάνος: Ιστορία δύο συνθέτων / Mikis and Manos: A Tale of Two Composers, by Nicholas Papandreou / Νίκος Παπανδρέου
Kerkyra Publications, Athens (2007); 14.1 x 20.5 cm, 124 pp., ISBN 9789608386426. (Full text in both Greek and English, with a 24-page ‘Photo Album’ in the middle. £12.50 (GBP) + postage and packing.
This is the text (in English and Greek) of a lecture by Nikos Papandreou at the Durrell School of Corfu in 2007, comparing and contrasting the compositional styles of Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis.
The Cat of Portovecchio: Corfu Tales, by Maria Strani-Potts
Brand and Schlesinger, Blackheath, NSW, Australia (2007); 13.6 x 21.0 cm, 276 pp., ISBN 9781876040857. (Despite its subtitle, this is a novel.) £12.95 (GBP) + postage and packing.
These stories derive from the author’s home of Mandouki, a suburb of Corfu, frequently referred to by its old-style Italian name. They are courageous stories relating to controversial issues such as the Greek civil war (and executions carried out on the Corfiot islet of Lazareto) and social behaviour of the Orthodox clergy.
Durrell Library of Corfu 