Ornela Vorpsi:

The Country Where No One Ever Dies

Translated by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck

ISBN 978-1-56478-568-8 Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign & London 2009 109 pp. A young girl's father is constantly forcing her to kiss him, and her aunt predicts that she will grow up to be a whore. With Albania's communist regime crumbling around them, sex, dictatorship, and death are inescapable subjects for the girl and her family—though she always confronts the ridiculousness of her often brutal reality with unflappable irony and a peculiar kind of common sense. Her name and age changing from chapter to chapter, she is an unforgettable portrait of the imagination under siege, while The Country Where No One Ever Dies is itself a one-of-a-kind atlas to a land where black comedy is simply a way of life. Ornela Vorpsi was born in Tirana, Albania and now lives in Paris. The Country Where No One Ever Dies  was her first novel and won several prizes in Italy, including the Grinzane Cavour and Viareggio Prizes. It has since been published in fourteen languages