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 Buy this Book on AMAZON
Robert Elsie