As an art critic he had often written that the purpose of art is to soothe the pain of life. But his theory faces a real-life test with a death, that of his father, the celebrated artist Stass. Overwhelmed by feelings of anger, guilt and loss, Michael finds himself descending into a kind of madness in which the boundaries between fact and fiction break down. In a terrifying alternative reality, where even time seems unstable, he encounters the horrific figure of Pound, a murderous Nazi-sympathiser, determined to get his hands on Stass's diary. There too Michael finds the protean but beautiful...

The relationship between art and anarchism has a long but often hidden history. Artists as diverse as Courbet, Pissarro, Signac, van Gogh, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Gris, and many others, have been positively identified as being anarchist, or having sympathies with anarchist ideas. But, as Michael Paraskos suggests in the course of these essays, there is an argument to be made that anarchist ideas are at the heart of all acts of artistic creation. From this Paraskos argues that we need to reconsider what it means to educate artists. He questions the usefulness of putting art students through an...

Written by the celebrated Cypriot artist Stass Paraskos, the Mythology of Cyprus is an immensely readable and truly entertaining journey through the pagan world of ancient Cyprus, when the island really was the Land of Aphrodite, goddess of love.

First published in 1981, the book was a pioneering exploration of the way ancient Greek mythology was understood in a regional location such as Cyprus. As Michael Paraskos explains in his new introduction, the book was written at a time when few academics bothered to pay much attention to Cyprus, and many Cypriots themselves preferred to see their...