Tess Fragoulis was born in Heraklion, Crete. She has lived in Holland, Greece and Toronto, but has spent most of her life in Montreal, where she currently resides. Her fiction has been published widely in Canadian literary journals, including Canadian Fiction Magazine, Grain, Blood & Aphorimsms, and in anthologies such as Lust for Life, Carnal Nation, and Making a Difference, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her first collection, Stories to Hide from Your Mother, was published by Arsenal Pulp Press in 1997, and nominated for the QWF Best First Book Prize. One of the stories was adapted for the Showcase series, Bliss. Her novel, Ariadne’s Dream, was published by Thistledown Press in 2001. It was nominated for the IMPAC International Dublin Literary Prize and received an Honourable Mention for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. She is also the editor of Musings: an anthology of Greek Canadian Literature, published in 2004 by Vehicule Press.

On Offer:

“Fragoulis populates a fascinating time and place with vital characters who live ardent, outsized lives. The Goodtime Girl is an exciting and moving read.”
     - Steven Heighton

“The Goodtime Girl has the marvellous, engrossing quality of a dream or a film by Fellini. It wraps us up completely in another place and time, one with its own logic and tragedy, so like and unlike our own. Exquisitely crafted but courageously blunt, strong and beautiful, it has sex, drugs, bouzouki music and a setting both real and exotic. The personal and the political, family, home and love, together with the loss or estrangements of all these, are the subjects of this edgy and important book. It is a novel that thrives on the clash of cultures and characters. This is the real stuff from one of Canada's most original voices.”
     - Michel Basilieres

“Kivelli sparkles in the darkness. While her entire family perishes in the horrors of the Catastrophe, along with thousands of others, Kivelli survives. Her struggle to invent a new life for herself, to rise from poverty and violence in a new land, makes for a fascinating story, told with great verve in Tess Fragoulis' splendid book.”
     - William Weintraub

The Goodtime Girl is set in the 20s in Asia Minor and Greece. It tells the general story of the destruction of the city of Smyrna by fire in 1922, and the particular story of Kivelli, a young woman from a respected Smyrnean family, who flees to Piraeus following the devastation. Kivelli is the only one of her family to have survived the fire, the crossing, and finds herself on the mainland alone, bereft. She is discovered in the box of an opera house by the Madame of a working class brothel, but is saved from the whore’s fate by a passing man who hears her singing out the window. He invites her to sing at his nearby tavern and here Kivelli is introduced to underworld of Piraeus and to the gangster Greek men who live by its code -- alternately honourable and violent.

Through Kivelli we meet Marianthi, wife of a Smyrnean composer. And through both women’s eyes we become enamoured with Diamantis, a local composer and singer who causes a rupture in Kivelli and Marianthi’s bond. The Goodtime Girl tells the story of Kivelli’s life among dangerous men; of her status as a refugee and an outcast among Greeks and among other women; of her memories of Smyrna and the fire, which she refuses to talk about during the day, but which play themselves out in her dreams; of her friendship with Marianthi based on need, love and rivalry; and finally of her fall from the grace of Smyrna and her subsequent rebirth in Piraeus. Unlike Smyrna, Kivelli rises again; singing lifts her momentarily out of the darkness that surrounded her after the fire, and turns her into a character from a novel she’d forgotten she’d read.

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Review Quotes:

For The Goodtime Girl
(excerpt published in Musings, Vehicle Press 2004):

“Tess Fragoulis’ novel excerpt centres on 1922 Greece and Anatolia, a time of genocide and occupations. Kivelli, it’s heroine, is a young Smyrnean, orphaned by the violence erupting around her, and presented with the narrow options of bordellos and bouzoukia-tavernas. Fragoulis re-creates the time and place in vivid layers of detail.”
     - The Globe & Mail

For Ariadne’s Dream

“A potent potion of superstition, religion, melodrama, mythology and mystery, Ariadne’s Dream follows Ariadne Hatzidakis’s modern journey from Montreal to Athens and finally to the Greek island, Nysas, that plays host to her self-exile. There, prose, play, and snapshot-like images fuse into an amalgam of narrative techniques and sequential flashbacks. Like an adjustable camera, the narrative offers both grounded and birds’ eye perspectives on love, death, and fate. Fragoulis’ adroit hand prevents the story from sliding into mere contrivance. When the plot’s seeming inconsistencies undermine the narrator’s reliability, the disparate threads are finely woven into one satisfying knot[…] This being a Greek tragedy, Ariadne is positioned as doomed at the novel’s outset, a fact that does nothing to contain Fragoulis’ whip-smart wit and engaging philosophizing.”
     - Quill & Quire

“A book replete with wry insights […] Ariadne’s Dream conveys the real world in robust detail […] Fragoulis depicts the loveliness of the setting with equally lovely sentences, transporting the reader to a gorgeous, exotic landscape…”
     - The Globe and Mail

“Fragoulis shows an intimate knowledge of the nature and power of dreams, whether conscious or unconscious, whether defined by longings or fears, Ariadne’s Dream shares the rarified air, not to mentions the poetic and amorous preoccupations, of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet…”
     - The Montreal Gazette

“[…]a very ambitious, highly complicated novel, that is successful in almost every aspect[…] Fragoulis provides a memorable reading experience.”
     - Books in Canada

For Stories to Hide from Your Mother

“In superb control of her material, with gorgeous, stirring and intelligent language, Fragoulis has made an impressive debut.”
     - Montreal Review of Books

“Montreal writer Tess Fragoulis’ first book of short stories is meant to be darkly and disturbingly confessional. Her work deals with women’s first kisses and fucks, their battles with married men, whores, and rapists, their fantasies about 16-year-old boys […] Most of her characters’ minds are splayed, their casual cruelty and vulgar impulses lucidly and sometimes sickeningly rendered […] it is more the way she writes rather than what she writes about that feels taboo.”
     - The Georgia Strait

“[Fragoulis’] stories move off into desires and longings of uncomfortable places. They shift into unusual directions but are written in tight, fierce and alluring prose. Her stories, in this collection, are sensual and unforgiving, while at the same time searching for forgiveness, whether outside or of the self.”
     - Ottawa X Press