Eleni N. Gage

Fall is a big time of year for me; I was born on October 8th and this year I'll be getting married in October, on 10/​10/​10 on the island of Corfu. I actually picked the date before I met the man, back in April 2008 when an Indian friend's astrologer uncle predicted I'd wed in September 2010, and she told me that he was good at divination, but he's always a month off.

Then next year, in fall 2011, my first novel will be released by St. Martin's Press (I'm working with the same fabulous editor and publisher as I did for North of Ithaka). It's tentatively titled Other Waters and is about an Indian-American psychiatrist who thinks that her family has been cursed. It's a new genre (fiction as opposed to memoir) and the settings differ from North of Ithaka--it takes place in New York, India, and back in New York--but both books address many of the same themes, such as building one identity between two cultures, and the conflict or interaction between faith and science.

I'll be updating this site regularly, so if you're interested in the novel--or the nuptials--watch this space!

Three years after North of Ithaka came out, I collaborated on Magical Greece, a book of gorgeous and unusual photos of, you guessed it, Greece. Andreas Smaragdis took the pictures and I wrote the text. The book is bilingual (I wrote the text in English and it was translated into Greek); check it out the new book at www.greeceinprint.com or www.economia.gr.

This website is a subtle attempt at mind control aimed at getting you to buy my first book, North of Ithaka, which was published by DeBoekerij in Holland in June, 2004, by Bantam in the United Kingdom, on July 8th, 2004, and by St. Martin's Press in May, 2005 in the U.S. The US paperback was released a year later. If you want a hardback and can't find it at your bookstore, you can still order it on www.powells.com, Booksense.com, Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com.


As for myself, I first appeared in Manhattan on Tuesday, October 8th, 1974, even though my aunts consider Tuesdays bad luck because Constantinople fell on a Tuesday. (Yes, we're Greek.) Just before my third birthday, my family moved to Athens, Greece. Five years later we relocated to Worcester, Massachusetts, the Paris of the 1980s.

I left Worcester to study Folklore and Mythology at Harvard College, specializing in Modern Greece. I graduated in 1996 and moved to New York to work at a succession of women's magazines, namely Allure, Elle, and InStyle, where I remain a Contributing Editor. In 2001 I became a full-time freelance writer, contributing to Travel+Leisure, Real Simple, The American Scholar, and The New York Times "Sunday Styles" section, among others.

Then, in March, 2002, I left Manhattan for Lia, the tiny village on the Greek-Albanian border where my father was born. (That's me at the gate to our house in the village last Fall.) There I spent 10 months going to gypsy weddings, presiding over rooster sacrifices, learning how to cook Dishrag Pie, and combating road rage, all while overseeing the rebuilding of my grandparents' house and writing a travel memoir about my experiences. After many revisions and lots of loud complaining on my part, that manuscript became North of Ithaka.