The essays in Ruin link meditations on teaching, friendship, motherhood, love, the financial meltdown in Greece, the shared language of politics and advertising, Occupy Wall Street, and the Parthenon Marbles into a relentless interrogation of identity and loss. Kalfopoulou’s Athens and New York are twinned sites of perpetual dislocation, palimpsests of political, economic, cultural—and personal—crisis. The refugee, the immigrant, the fragmented ‘I’ charted in these essays—all are studies in exilic living, pilgrims wandering the wreckage of late capitalism.