What is "Who Speaks," what are the "Inappropriate Lives"? Can they be called short stories? Can they fit into the category of the narratives of Papadiamantis, Koundylakis, Vizyenos, or even the more contemporary Greek short story writers?

The stories of Takopoulos, - let's call them that for now - are more often satirical or humorously poetic "bitter" short tales, drawing their origin from the so-called English and American "short stories," a genre with certain rules, the strictest of which, apart from the existence of humor, is brevity and the absence of any superfluous elements, that is, an absolute economy of writing, which constitutes its main chapter, as Adam Smith or the also prolific Karl Marx would not say.

And they are fortunate to be accompanied by the drawings of Sophia Zarampouka, as fitting as James Thurber's illustrations for his own short stories. Just as we could never claim in English that Papadiamantis and Dostoevsky wrote short stories, it is also not possible to label the short stories of Henry James, James Thurber, or Dorothy Parker and Pari Takopoulos as such in Greek.

Perhaps we should not forget that both were also critics. How can one forget the epigrammatic ending of a critique by Dorothy Parker on Eugene O'Neill's "Iceman Cometh"? "The Iceman cometh, it is longeth and it stinketh." Or the other one she wrote about Katharine 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 significance of the "letters").