The Country Where No One Ever Dies
Ornela Vorpsi · 2009 · Dalkey Archive Press · translated by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck
Fifteen short chapters, a girl growing up in Communist Albania: a beautiful, unhappy mother, a father jailed for nothing, a country of dust and mud where a woman's name can be ruined by a single rumor. Ornela Vorpsi, born in Tirana, wrote it in Italian and won a shelf of prizes for it. Small, sharp, and merciless about the place it comes from.
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A former Albanian diplomat's account of the quiet back-channel that helped thaw the coldest border of the Cold War. Zhulati, his country's UN representative in the 1980s, traces years of careful, coded contact with an American academic — the patient, unofficial diplomacy running beneath the headline when the United States and Albania restored relations in 1991. Available as an ebook and audiobook.
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A Short Border Handbook
by Gazmend Kapllani · 2009
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Ypi grew up in Albania believing she was free — then watched one version of freedom collapse into another in the 1990s. This award-winning memoir moves from a child's-eye view of the last Stalinist state to the pyramid-scheme chaos that followed, using her own family to ask what freedom actually means. Ypi is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics; the book has been translated into more than twenty languages.
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