Just for the text titled The Lyre and the Lute, one must read the new book by Despina Tomazani! It is a tender, precious, unique text. The moon will play the lute on November 28 here in Chios. What coffee houses, what faces, what Augonimou scholars, what instruments that breathe and therefore do not die, sensitive instruments, made of living material!

As for the other story, about the ten-year-old boy who falls in love with his teacher and after confessing his love to her, lists his qualifications and, suddenly, as he is leaving the classroom, he turns around and abruptly tells her, and if you want to know, ...I can also play the bouzouki! And those wonderful Words from the Bar and the other, The Nostalgia of Hearing, with the touches between people, the caresses, the hugs, which we miss so much...

In Off the Network, Tomazani does not just write. She feels deeply. And what she feels, she expresses at every moment, with a sigh, a laugh, a grimace of anger. She constantly engages with wonderful things that we have almost forgotten, she delights in a harbor, a rock, a sunset, she leaps into the Chios of her childhood, claims the guns of her deceased uncle, which the greedy neighbor has taken, and she has a multitude of birds, ants, theater mice, houses with open doors and windows, and women in love with their bodies covered in tattoos in her gaze...

I was moved by Off the Network. For all the reasons I have already mentioned. But also for the fact that this book by Despina Tomazani is not published by a famous Athenian publishing house, but by the alpha pi editions of Chios, please!

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]