Paracharaktis

In *After All*, Achilles III decides to destroy the world – not just once, but twenty-four times. Taking the end of the world as his starting point, he creates and presents a host of strange – or perhaps not so strange, after all – worlds, in which nothing is impossible. With the end of everything seeming more like an opportunity than a threat, the familiar rules are overturned and every Revelation leads to further revelations, making it clear that, in fact, the End itself is of far less significance and interest than everything that can happen before one reaches it. In the stories in this book, the whole world is examined under a microscope, observed through a telescope, filtered through various lenses, transformed before distorting mirrors of every kind, dissolved and reconstituted countless times, and presented as a crossroads where the paradoxical, humour and a critical view of reality meet and draw the reader into a different literary universe, where everything obeys, to the very end, a single rule: that ‘No rule applies’.

The Counterfeiter is a collection of short photographic stories, that is, stories accompanied by irrefutable photographic evidence of the existence of a strange and unpredictable world; a world which, hidden between the lines, in the breaths, in the opening and closing of the eyes and in the thin grey layers of reality, waits for the right moment to unfold. There, amongst other incredible things, one might encounter a man who takes up smoking at the age of seventy and tries to make up for lost time by smoking four packets of cigarettes a day, a show-winning lap dog that reminisces about the years it spent working as a sheepdog in Grevena, a teddy bear who detests displays of affection and finds himself in a professional and emotional dead end, a goldfish with the memory of three elephants who feels trapped in his bowl and seeks new experiences, a gravedigger who has been digging other people’s graves for forty years without ever falling in himself, and a man who makes a living by impersonating the voice of conscience on behalf of unscrupulous people willing to pay him for it. In this subversive book, Achilles III challenges the obvious and, in doing so, subverts established notions and stereotypes, presenting a series of – often bizarre – stories, in which the paradoxical is presented as real and commonplace, whilst what is usually considered normal and an accepted part of most people’s daily lives is treated with the scepticism it deserves and re-evaluated, without hesitation and without any obligation to obey any rule other than the one that states that ‘No rule applies’.

In ‘Outside’, Achilles III walks the fine line that separates – and at the same time connects – the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’, presenting stories featuring people who live on the margins of society and, whether they put themselves on public display by roaming the streets or hide in the city’s dark corners, each sends out their own unique message on a frequency that usually goes unnoticed. In the book’s twenty-two short stories, the reader enters a different literary universe, full of twists and turns, briefly falls in step with people with whom, as they journey on, they discover they have far more in common than they initially believed, sees their reflection in unexpected surfaces and looks harsh truths straight in the eye. Then, moving into a world where everything obeys the rule that ‘There are no rules’, at some point he is called upon to decide whether, ultimately, what he has watched unfold from page to page is more paradoxical than the things that surround him daily and no longer make a particular impression on him simply because he has grown accustomed to them…