Elena Georgiou

Writer, editor, and professor Elena Georgiou: author of Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants and mercy mercy me; co-editor of The World in Us...

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Booklist, American Library Association review of The Immigrant’s Refrigerator

By e g

I’m grateful for the thoughtful and generous review of The Immigrant’s Refrigerator by Kathy Sexton, for the American Library Association’s Booklist.

Although immigrants aren’t the sole characters in Georgiou’s collection, they are the thread that binds its 12 quiet, yet powerful stories. Many are fleeing violence, like the Irish writer in the title story who’s running from the war that tore apart his family, or the Somali man living in Maine after years spent in a refugee camp. But some are just trying to fulfill the promise of a better life, like the Bolivian woman forced to work as a cleaning woman and a stripper to provide for her child. Georgiou uses repetitive imagery to tie the stories together along with themes of displacement and loneliness. What elevates this collection is that it is just as often the American characters in their own homeland who experience these feelings as they’re searching for the elusive thing called home or, more likely, simple human connection. It is this mutual longing that shows characters’ shared humanity and the compassion and kindness that can help overcome differences. Georgiou’s timely collection will appeal to any reader interested in immigration issues.

Read the review at Booklist

NEW BOOK FOR 2018!

The Immigrant's Refrigerator
Fiction. Short Stories.
GenPop Books, 2018

If luck is on an author’s side, a book reaches its audience at the right time. Elena Georgiou’s The Immigrant’s Refrigerator can confidently make this claim. Populated with a cast of characters that shine the light on what it means to be an outsider in the early part of the 21st century, this story collection takes its reader into the private lives of those who have entered a country legally, others who were forced to enter illegally, and the rest who call a country home as a result of birth; characters searching for what they need to sustain them on their journeys towards a future that will not only be a place of refuge, but also one of hope.

Read more about The Immigrant's Refrigerator

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