PRAISE FOR THE IMMIGRANT’S REFRIGERATOR

A Lambda Literary Award–winning poet, Georgiou portrays immigrants to America, both legal and illegal, in heartfelt, no-nonsense prose. The opening story, “Gazpacho,” features a man in a Mexican border town who provides soup for boys heading to America by train (“el tren de la muerte”) — or being forced to return. For money, he drives a hearse, frequently repatriating children’s bodies from America — 257 so far; “each time, …a small country turns to dust inside me.” In another piece, white employees at a confectionary find that listening to news about police shootings “with a dark-skinned man — a refugee! — in their midst had made their hands clumsier,” and an MFA student from Northern Ireland who works for a gay escort service can’t be friends “with anyone who had not known troops standing on the corner of the same road as the house in which they were born.” It’s indeed brutally hard to imagine that kind of experience, but Georgiou brings it closer. Verdict: A keen, sobering work. Ten percent of profits will go to the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Center.

—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal: “The Art of the Short Story: 16 New Collections Reveal the Best of a Flourishing Genre”

Although immigrants aren’t the sole characters in Georgiou’s collection, they are the thread that binds its 12 quiet, yet powerful stories. Many are fleeing violence, like the Irish writer in the title story who’s running from the war that tore apart his family, or the Somali man living in Maine after years spent in a refugee camp. But some are just trying to fulfill the promise of a better life, like the Bolivian woman forced to work as a cleaning woman and a stripper to provide for her child. Georgiou uses repetitive imagery to tie the stories together along with themes of displacement and loneliness. What elevates this collection is that it is just as often the American characters in their own homeland who experience these feelings as they’re searching for the elusive thing called home or, more likely, simple human connection. It is this mutual longing that shows characters’ shared humanity and the compassion and kindness that can help overcome differences. Georgiou’s timely collection will appeal to any reader interested in immigration issues.

—Kathy Sexton, Booklist

Elena Georgiou’s exquisite collection could not be more timely. At a moment when America’s political response to The Other is triggering a national crisis of conscience, these poignant stories remind us of the vital role that human compassion plays in bridging ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic divides. Inside The Immigrant’s Refrigerator, the foreign and the familiar share and trade shelf space. Unspeakable sorrows and distant joys appear in the form of bacon, hummus, homemade bread. Papaya salad. Whatever the delicacy, Georgiou’s secret sauce is the essential goodness of humanity. Citizens of Maine nourish Somali immigrants with handcrafted chocolates. A refugee from Niger comforts his grieving host in Vermont by teaching her to savor Brie. Sustenance acquires profound meaning in these tales of endurance, hope, and the abiding power of quiet generosity.

—Aimee Liu, author of Flash House and Cloud Mountain

The Immigrant’s Refrigerator is a quietly devastating collection of stories about loners, craving love and connection, trying to survive in a world where war is always raging somewhere and happiness is a phantom of the future. That these loners are Americans as often as they are immigrants and refugees is this collection’s greatest strength. Elena Georgiou’s voice is quirky and surprising; her ability to turn a phrase upside down invites us to experience the world and ourselves in a new way.  There are no easy answers in The Immigrant’s Refrigerator; Georgiou’s focus is on tipping a moment over the edge to find the broken pieces of our shared humanity.  And yet, and still, it is a celebration of life in all of its scars and joys, chance and invention, awe and longing to be seen, and, over and over, a testament to the tender, transformative power of acceptance and love.

— Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, author of Hiroshima in the Morning and Why She Left Us

Elena Georgiou is a dazzlingly good writer. The thirteen stories in The Immigrant’s Refrigerator are stirring, wise, and keenly alert to the longings and contradictions that impel their beguiling characters. I loved this collection.

—John McManus, author of Fox Tooth Heart and Bitter Milk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elena Georgiou is the author of the short-story collection The Immigrant’s Refrigerator (GenPop Books, 2018), and the poetry collections Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (Harbor Mountain Press) and mercy mercy me (University of Wisconsin), which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award. She is also co-editor (with Michael Lassell) of the poetry anthology, The World In Us (St. Martin’s Press).

Georgiou has won an Astraea Emerging Writers Award, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work appears in journals such as BOMB, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Gargoyle, Lumina, MiPoesia, and Spoon River Review. She is an editor at Tarpaulin Sky Press and the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College.

Georgiou is an English-Cypriot originally from London, where she spent the first twenty-seven years of her life.  Since then, she has lived in the US — first in New York, now in Vermont. She maintains a website at elenageorgiou.com.

(reverse chronology)

11 October 2018: Fairfax, VA
Award Cermeony
Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award
Finalists: Elena Georgiou, Hernán Díaz, and Renee Macalino Rutledge
George Mason University
4400 University Drive

30 September 2018: Calais, VT
Elena Georgiou with Rick Agran
Words Out Loud Reading Series
Old West Church
758 Old W Church Road

24 April 2018: Montpelier, VT
VT Book launch for Elena Georgiou’s The Immigrant’s Refrigerator
Fundraiser for the VT Refugee Relocation Project (VRRP)
Reading & Q & A
7pm at Bear Pond Books

12 April 2018: Pittsfield, MA
Elena Georgiou at Berkshire Community College
1350 West St
Time TBD

4 April 2018: Lincroft, NJ
Elena Georgiou and Haroon Moghul
Refuge: Literary Readings from Diverse Writers
7-9pm in the Warner Center
Brookdale Community College

19 February 2018: Port Townsend, WA
Elena Georgiou withRebecca Brown and Keenan Norris
4:45 to 5:45pm
Fort Worden
Reading Room
Building 204

15 February 2018: Seattle, WA
Elena Georgiou, Micheline Aharoninan Marcom, and Rebecca Brown
7pm @ Elliott Bay Books

13 February 2018: Boston, MA
Elena Georgiou and KL Pereira
Boston Public Library
Time 6 pm

18 January 2018: Brooklyn, NY
Book Launch for Elena Georgiou’s The Immigrant’s Refrigerator
7:30pm @ Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton St in Fort Greene

16 November 2017: NYC
Jezebels Revisited, with Kelli Dunham, Elena Georgiou, and Lauren Sanders
7pm @ KGB Bar
85 E 4th St