A Writer's Journal Through Greece

Touching Eros

Written as a personal journal rather than a conventional narrative, Touching Eros follows a restless writing teacher's search for beauty, love, and the force the Greeks called Eros, while traveling through Athens, Santorini, and Paros with his girlfriend Miranda, who keeps her own journal, and has her own way of looking at the world.

The narrator is constantly viewing their experiences through cynicism and comparison, with the darkness and idiocies of modern culture held up against the genius of the Minoans and the great cultures that came millennia before us. Miranda, meanwhile, writes things like "Ah, rose, your petals seem to betray..."

Over the course of the trip, the writer comes to realize that Eros isn't only about fulfilling desires. It's also the longing and receptiveness that drive art and imagination and electrify the senses, and it exists everywhere.

Athens, Santorini, and Paros each mark a different stage of the writer's shift from cynicism and complaint toward something closer to the awakening he is longing for. Greece in its many forms is a perfect backdrop for the shift of consciousness that takes place within him, even after they travel back home to New York. What remains are the ancient whispers he heard and will always remember.

Published in 2026, Touching Eros is one of four books Marks released that year, alongside Love +/- Time, Emily's Game, and Timshel's Choice, his most concentrated stretch of new fiction since he completed The Dance and the Diamond Sky in 1988.

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