'Behind Stone Walls' is a sociological, or more specifically, a social anthropological study of traditional Albanian society. It focuses, in particular, on the formation and evolution of household and family structures among the Kosovo Albanians and was written on the basis of field work carried out by the author in the village of Isniq in western Kosovo in 1976. The study provides the reader with a fascinating glimpse into an exotic world which will soon belong to the past, as the author predicted.

The folktales of this collection were gathered and translated into English by the noted Scottish anthropologist Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948) in the late 1920s and 1930s. She collected them, for the most part, not from experienced storytellers, but directly from the children, young people and elementary school teachers she met during her long years of stay in Albania. The narratives are accordingly simple, taken, so to speak, from the mouths of babes. The Hasluck Collection of Albanian Folktales comprising 115 tales, is by far the largest ever to appear in English.

The Kosovo Albanian poet, Ali Podrimja (1942-2012), is considered by many to be the most typical representative of modern Albanian verse in Kosovo and is certainly the Kosovo poet with the widest international reputation. His verse is compact in structure, and his imagery is direct, terse and devoid of any artificial verbosity. Every word counts. The present selection of verse is designed to provide the reader with an overview of the poetic evolution of Ali Podrimja. It touches upon the early years of dynamic optimism in the 1960s, visits the haunts of anguish and personal solitude in the...

The Canadian scholar and writer Robert Elsie, who was born in Vancouver in 1950, has been working and publishing in the field of Albanian Studies for about thirty-five years. The present book is a compilation of his major articles and essays on Albanian culture (history, literature, philology, religion, etc.), a reflection of his constant endeavour to make the tiny Albanian nation better known in the world.

Diese Zusammenstellung von 100 Buchbesprechungen ist eine Ruckschau auf ein Vierteljahrhundert der Auseinandersetzung mit Albanien, einem Land des schnellen Wandels und schwerer Erschutterungen, das die Annaherung an die Europaische Union anstrebt und doch weiter als fast alle osteuropaischen Lander von einem Beitritt zur EU entfernt ist. Angeordnet nach den Erscheinungsjahren der Titel, dokumentiert sie nicht so sehr das Land, sondern vor allem die sehr verschiedenen Blickwinkel darauf, weil nur wenige dieser Bucher in Albanien selbst erschienen sind."

This reader presents the best of classical Albanian literature, from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It includes the best-known works of the age, poetry in particular. After a sluggish start, Albanian literature flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. By the mid-1930s, it reached a zenith, when intellectual life in the country was finally on a sound footing. A modern literature had been created in Albania and the nation had come of age. Alas, it was a brief blossoming in the shadow of the apocalypse which loomed in the form of the Stalinist regime that seized...

Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle offers the reader a passionate overview of events in the Balkans in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It focuses primarily on Montenegro and Albania, but also deals with Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia. By the time of its initial publication in 1920, its author, the British traveller and writer, Edith Durham (1863-1944), had attained fame in the region and was well-known in the English-speaking world for her insight and first-hand knowledge of the western Balkans. This book constitutes a culmination and synthesis of Edith Durham's writing and can in...

Stalinism, that particularly brutal phase of the Communist experience, came to an end in most of Europe with the death of Stalin in 1953. However, in one country Albania Stalinism survived virtually unscathed until 1990. The regime that the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha led from 1944 until his death in 1985 was incomparably severe. Such was the reign of terror that no audible voice of opposition or dissent ever arose in the Balkan state and Albania became isolated from the rest of the world and utterly inward-looking. Three decades after his death, the spectre of Hoxha still lingers over the...