Tales from Old Shkodra
Early Albanian Short Stories
Albanian Studies, Vol. 5
ISBN 978-1508417224
Centre for Albanian Studies, London 2015
175 pp.
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.
Table of Contents
Preface
Ernest Koliqi:
The Blood Feud
The Dukagjini Dancer
The Garden
The Golden Cradle
Migjeni:
The Story of One of Those Women
The Student Back Home
Tragedy or Comedy?
Refrain of my Town
Forbidden Fruit
Do You Need Any Coal, Sir?
The Suicide of the Sparrow
Little Luli
In the Fly Season
The Platform of a Magazine
The Headless Idols
The Legend of Corn
Lethal Beauty
The Harvest
Zenel
The Robber’s Kiss
Appendix:
Albania Then and Now, by Stuart Mann
Bibliography
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