"No author who lives in Greece," writes Peter Bien, "can avoid politics." This first volume of his major intellectual biography of Nikos Kazantzakis approaches

The life of Nikos Kazantzakis—the author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ—was as colorful and eventful as his fiction. And nowhere is hi

First published in 1946, "Zorba the Greek," is, on one hand, the story of a Greek working man named Zorba, a passionate lover of life, the unnamed narrator who

Like The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis is a fictionalized biography of a widely venerated Christian figure: Francis of Assisi, whose renunciation of