What is "who is the speaker", what are "Inappropriate Lives"? Can they be called short stories? Can they fit into the category of narratives by Papadiamantis, Kondylakis, Vizyinou, or even of more contemporary Greek short story writers? The stories of Takopoulos, - let's call them that for now - are more often satirical or humorous, sometimes poetically “bitter” little tales, drawing their roots from the so-called English and American "short stories".

A genre with certain rules, the strictest of which is, besides the presence of humor, brevity and the absence of any superfluous elements, meaning an absolute economy of writing, which constitutes its main chapter, as Adam Smith or the equally prolific Karl Marx would not say; and they are fortunate to be accompanied by the illustrations of Sofia Zarampouka, as aptly as James Thurber's drawings for his own short stories.

Just as we could never claim in English that Papadiamantis and Dostoevsky wrote short stories, it is also impossible to characterize in Greek the short stories of Henry James, James Thurber, or Dorothy Parker and Paris Takopoulos as tales. Perhaps we should not forget that both latter authors were also critics.

How could one forget the epigrammatic ending of a review by Dorothy Parker for Eugene O'Neill's "Iceman Cometh": "The Iceman cometh, it is longeth and it stinketh." Or the other remark she made about Kathrine Hepburn, in one of her first appearances: "she ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B" (she traversed the entire scale of emotions from A to B, with the musical meaning of the "letters").