Alexander the Great A Novel

"Dear Mr. Kazantzakis, I received your novel Griechische Passion with the beautiful hand-written inscription, and have read it with sincere emotion. The novel is without doubt a work of high artistic order, formed by a tender and firm hand, and built up with strong dynamic power. I have particularly admired the poetic tact in phrasing the subtle, yet unmistakable allusions to the Christian Passion Play. They give the book its mythical background which is such a vital element in the epic form today. . . . Please accept my best wishes for the future. Most cordially yours, Thomas Mann." - Thomas Mann, in a letter to Nikos Kazantzakis

"I held great admiration and, if you would allow me, a kind of affection for your husband's work. I have not forgotten that on the very day when I regretted receiving a distinction (of the Nobel Prize for Literature) that Kazantzakis deserved a hundred times more, I received from him the most generous of telegrams. . . . With him disappears one of our last great artists. I am among those who feel and will continue to feel the void he has left. - Albert Camus, in a letter to Eleni Kazantzakis)

"The great writer made me enter an enchanted universe where man, starlit dust, pursues with the same relentlessness his battle with himself and with God. Whoever begins to read Kazantzakis cannot stop." - Elie Wiesel, in All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs

"This beautiful book is a labor of love in two senses: Nikos Kazantzakis first wrote this novel to give us a human, even tender view of Alexander, the man who changed history and the world; and Niki Stavrou, through her virtuosity as a translator, has provided the Anglophone world with access to this remarkable novel. Readers will come away with a rich set of images and fresh ideas and perspectives about Alexander, his time, and the time in which Kazantzakis was writing, when Hellenism was again in crisis and in need of such a hero." - Christine Philliou, University of California, Berkeley