A few words about the author

Soti Triantafyllou was born in Athens. She studied in Athens, Paris, New York, and London. She is a writer and a historian of the United States. She translates from four languages and writes for the press.
She has published novels, novellas, essays, and short stories. From Patakis Publishers her works include: The Pencil Factory (2000), Poor Margo (2001), Albatross (2003), Forgiveness (2005), Chinese Boxes (2006), Saturday Night at the Edge of the City (2008), A Little of Your Blood (2008), Time Again (2009), Tomorrow, Another Country (2009), The Subterranean Sky (2010), For the Love of Geometry (2011), Rare Earths (2013), Mechanical Waterfalls (2014), Letter from Alaska (2015), Sparkling Fields (2016), The End of the World in an English Garden (2017, State Prize for Literature), The Fairground on the Holy Mountain (2019), Sicilian Idyll (2021), Listen to the Lion (2023), The Flight (new edition, 2023), Pittsburgh (new edition, 2023), Los Angeles: Driving in Southern California (new, revised edition, 2024), The Blind Pig on Second Street (2025); the essays Left-Wing Terrorism, Democracy, and the State (with Elias Ioakeimoglou, 2003), Speaking with Alice about Philosophy and the Meaning of Life (2012), Pluralism, Multiculturalism, Integration, Assimilation (2015), Alone in the World: European Writers, Anti-Americanism and American Solitude (2019); as well as the collections of political articles Sharks and Bedbugs: Notes for the Third Decade of the 21st Century (2023), On the Ship of Fools: Instructions for Use (2024). She has also written books for children and young people: A Letter from a Dragon (2005), African Diary (2008), Milena and the Horrible Fish (2011), Marion on the Silver Islands and in the Red Forests (revised edition, 2014), The Ancient Greeks Stick Their Noses Everywhere (2015), The Ancient Greeks Stick Their Noses Everywhere (Again) (2016), Talking about Expression–Composition (2017).

A few words about the book

Lee Phillips, formerly Elias Filippopoulos, in his book Left Pleurisy: Memoirs of an American Red recounts his life from 1918, when he took the ship for America, until 1961, when he left Memphis, Tennessee, to settle in his beloved Moscow.
When in 1968 his nephew Chris Phillips decides to quit his job in Memphis and go to San Francisco to find his brother, his uncle Lee’s autobiographical book falls into his hands and… “No one asked me to tell the story of the Phillips family and of our city, of Memphis, Tennessee. No one asked me not to tell it. So I told this true story that is full of lies.”