Tales from Albarado

Tales from Albarado
Author: Smoki Musaraj
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2020-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501750356
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Tales from Albarado revisits times of excitement and loss in early 1990s Albania, in which about a dozen pyramid firms collapsed and caused the country to fall into anarchy and a near civil war. To gain a better understanding of how people from all walks of life came to invest in these financial schemes and how these schemes became intertwined with everyday transactions, dreams, and aspirations, Smoki Musaraj looks at the materiality, sociality, and temporality of financial speculations at the margins of global capital. She argues that the speculative financial practices of the schemes were enabled by official financial infrastructures (such as the postsocialist free-market reforms), by unofficial economies (such as transnational remittances), as well as by historically specific forms of entrepreneurship, transnational social networks, and desires for a European modernity. Overall, these granular stories of participation in the Albanian schemes help understand neoliberal capitalism as a heterogeneous economic formation that intertwines capitalist and noncapitalist forms of accumulation and investment.

Northern Albanian Folk Tales, Myths and Legends

Northern Albanian Folk Tales, Myths and Legends
Author: Arti Malaj
Publisher: Homestead Albania Prints
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2022-04-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1659604656
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Generations of Northern Albanian are known as great story tellers. They shared many folk tales, myths, and legends with their descendants. The collected short stories include mysterious legends of lost treasures, mystical tales of mountain fairies, superhuman powers, century-old witches, blood feuds, and more written by a twelfth-generation Albanian. The lands described in the stories are still visible today, and locals share a sense of wonder and respect the mysteries that hide beneath. Northern Albania is a true treasure of raw natural beauty and a hidden gem in Southeastern Europe.

The Accursed Mountains

The Accursed Mountains
Author: Robert Carver
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN:
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The remarkable tale of a series of journeys through remote, extraordinary Albania in the brief period between Communism and anarchy before it was again closed to Western travellers. Travelling by bus, on foot, by mule and horse, staying with Albanians in their houses and crumbling Stalinist tower blocks, Robert Carver meets Vlach shepherds and village intellectuals, ex-Communist Special Forces officers and juvenile heroin smugglers, missionaries with jeeps and light planes, and ex-prisoners of Enver Hoxha who have spent 45 years in the Albanian gulag. In the remote villages of the Accursed Mountains of the far north, he is the first Briton seen since the Second World War, when Intelligence officers were parachuted in to help fight the German occupiers. On his journey to Lake Gashit, high above the snowline on the Serb-Montenegrin border, Carver survives murder attempts and suicidal bus rides. He sees villages last visited by outsiders in 1933, which had effectively been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world. In Tirana he experiences the contrasting side to life in Albania when he finds himself in the diplomatic set, inadvertantly consorting with Balkan highlife and involved with eccentrics worthy of an Evelyn Waugh novel. High adventure, danger and comedy alike are recounted in this sharp and spirited narrative, a highly original experience of a mysterious mountain land.

Tales from Albania

Tales from Albania
Author: Mark D. Vickers
Publisher: Besa
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-12-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9786269559602
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TALES FROM ALBANIA takes the reader on a journey through this fascinating and ancient land, a journey through time and place. Included are some personal reminiscences and travels of the author's three years living in this country he came to love, but he also introduces the reader to aspects of Albanian culture, tradition, folklore and history, often intertwined. The book dips in and out of different aspects of the country and its people in a flowing style, with the aim of sharing some of the author's own fascination and passion for "the Land of the Eagles".

The Folktale

The Folktale
Author: Stith Thompson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 524
Release: 1977
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780520033597
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As interest in folklore increases, the folktale acquires greater significance for students and teachers of literature. The material is massive and scattered; thus, few students or teachers have accessibility to other than small segments or singular tales or material they find buried in archives. Stith Thompson has divided his book into four sections which permit both the novice and the teacher to examine oral tradition and its manifestation in folklore. The introductory section discusses the nature and forms of the folktale. A comprehensive second part traces the folktale geographically from Ireland to India, giving culturally diverse examples of the forms presented in the first part. The examples are followed by the analysis of several themes in such tales from North American Indian cultures. The concluding section treats theories of the folktale, the collection and classification of folk narrative, and then analyzes the living folklore process. This work will appeal to students of the sociology of literature, professors of comparative literature, and general readers interested in folklore.

The Fall of the Stone City

The Fall of the Stone City
Author: Ismail Kadare
Publisher: Canongate Books
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2012-08-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0857863339
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Shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013. In September 1943, Nazi troops advance on the ancient gates of Gjirokastër, Albania. The very next day, the Germans vanish without a trace. As the townsfolk wonder if they might have dreamt the events of the previous night, rumours circulate of a childhood friendship between a local dignitary and the invading Nazi Colonel, a reunion in the town square and a fateful dinner party that would transform twentieth-century Europe. A captivating novel of resistance in a dictatorship, and steeped in Albanian folklore, The Fall of the Stone City shows Kadare at the height of his powers.

A Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology, and Folk Culture

A Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology, and Folk Culture
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814722145
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In some senses, Albania is a living museum of the past. Originally a small herding community in the most inaccessible reaches of the Balkans, the presence of Albanians in southeastern Europe has been documented for over a thousand years. Albanian traditional folk culture, which evolved over centuries of relative isolation, is surprisingly rich. Yet despite recent events this culture remains little known to the Western world. Due to the lasting effects of a half century of Stalinist dictatorship, very few individuals even in Albania know much about their own popular traditions. The Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology, and Folk Culture makes available for the first time a wealth of knowledge about Albanian popular belief and folk customs. Alphabetical entries shed light on blood feuding, figures of Albanian mythology, religious beliefs, communities, and sects, calendar feasts and rituals, and popular superstitions, as well as birth, marriage, and funeral customs, and sexual mores. This unique volume will stand as the standard reference work on the subject for years to come.

Albanian Folktales and Legends

Albanian Folktales and Legends
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: Peja, Kosovo : Dukagjini
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2001
Genre: Legends
ISBN:
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Tales from Old Shkodra

Tales from Old Shkodra
Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2015-02-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9781508417224
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In the 1920s and 1930s, the writers of Shkodra in northern Albania were profoundly aware of the misery around them, and it is perhaps the extreme diversity of their social environment which furthered their talents. They looked to the West and longed for a new, European Albania, yet they found themselves in an archaic society, one so bound by the force of tradition and custom that progress was impossible. Their writings reflected and gave full expression to this dilemma. The present collection brings together a number of well-known short stories and prose sketches by two of the finest Albanian writers of the first half of the twentieth century: Ernest Koliqi and Migjeni. These two men of Shkodra, one raised as a Catholic and the other as Orthodox, could scarcely have been more different.

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History
Author: Lea Ypi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2022-01-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393867749
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Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.