Balkan Beauty, Balkan Blood

Balkan Beauty, Balkan Blood PDF Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810123371
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
In these stories representing the last three decades of Albanian writing--especially the burst of creativity in the newfound freedom of the 1990s--readers will encounter work that reflects the literary paradox of Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century: the startling originality of the new uneasily coupled with the strains of history; the sophistication and self-consciousness of late (or post-) modernity married to the simplicity of a literature first finding its voice; a refusal of political influence and pressure expressed through frankly political subject matter.

Balkan Beauty, Balkan Blood

Balkan Beauty, Balkan Blood PDF Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810123371
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
In these stories representing the last three decades of Albanian writing--especially the burst of creativity in the newfound freedom of the 1990s--readers will encounter work that reflects the literary paradox of Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century: the startling originality of the new uneasily coupled with the strains of history; the sophistication and self-consciousness of late (or post-) modernity married to the simplicity of a literature first finding its voice; a refusal of political influence and pressure expressed through frankly political subject matter.

Balkan Blues

Balkan Blues PDF Author: Joanna Labon
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 9780810113251
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Essays, stories and a play set in Yugoslavia. The title piece, written by Dubravka Ugresic, is a satire on murderous folklore, while Bogdan Bogdanovic's The City of Death is on Belgrade.

The Balkans in World History

The Balkans in World History PDF Author: Andrew Baruch Wachtel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199882738
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
In the historical and literary imagination, the Balkans loom large as a somewhat frightening and ill-defined space, often seen negatively as a region of small and spiteful peoples, racked by racial and ethnic hatred, always ready to burst into violent conflict. The Balkans in World History re-defines this space in positive terms, taking as a starting point the cultural, historical, and social threads that allow us to see this region as a coherent if complex whole. Eminent historian Andrew Wachtel here depicts the Balkans as that borderland geographical space in which four of the world's greatest civilizations have overlapped in a sustained and meaningful way to produce a complex, dynamic, sometimes combustible, multi-layered local civilization. It is the space in which the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, of Byzantium, of Ottoman Turkey, and of Roman Catholic Europe met, clashed and sometimes combined. The history of the Balkans is thus a history of creative borrowing by local people of the various civilizations that have nominally conquered the region. Encompassing Bulgaria, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, and European Turkey, the Balkans have absorbed many voices and traditions, resulting in one of the most complex and interesting regions on earth.

The Tribes of Albania

The Tribes of Albania PDF Author: Robert Elsie
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857725866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Northern Albania and Montenegro are the only regions in Europe to have retained a true tribal society up to the mid-twentieth century. This book provides the first scholarly investigation of this tribal society, a pioneer work that offers a detailed survey of all the major Albanian-speaking tribes in Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo. Robert Elsie provides comprehensive material on the 69 different tribes, including data on their locations, religious affiliations, tribal structures and relations, population statistics, tribal folklore, legends and history. Also included are excerpts from the works of prominent nineteenth and early-twentieth century writers, such as Edith Durham and Johann Georg von Hahn, who travelled through the tribal regions, as well as short biographies on prominent figures linked to the tribes. As the first book of its kind, The Tribes of Albania will be of interest to scholars and students of the Balkans, of southeastern European anthropology, ethnography and history.

Closed for Repairs

Closed for Repairs PDF Author: Nancy Alonso
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Closed for Repairs is a series of eleven vignettes that depict Cuban ingenuity in the face of urban problems. Each solution is framed with humor and irony and gives a glimpse of life on the island today. In a clever fashion, Nancy Alonso shows us the spirit of resolve on the part of Cubans when faced with such issues as transportation problems, lack of water, and the shortage of consumer goods and construction materials caused by the embargo. Illuminating the endurance and resilience of the Cuban people, these stories will make you chuckle. Alonso's sly wit is compelling as she satirizes the bureaucracy-an element of her work that will resonate universally. Nancy Alonso is an award-winning short story writer with a background in biological science. She published Tirar la Primera Piedra (Casting the First Stone) in 1997 and Cerrado por Reparacion (Closed for Repairs) in 2002. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies in Cuba and abroad. She currently lives in Cojimar, Cuba. Anne Fountain teaches Latin American Literature and Culture and coordinates Latin American Studies at San Jose State University. She is the author of Jose Marti and U.S. Writers (University Press of Florida, 2003) and Versos Sencillos: A Dual-Language Edition (McFarland, 2005).

Balkan Biodiversity

Balkan Biodiversity PDF Author: Huw I. Griffiths
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402028547
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This is the first attempt to synthesize current understanding of biodiversity in the great European hot spot. A diverse group of international researchers offers perspective on biodiversity at the level of the gene, species and ecosystem, including contributions on temporal change. Biological groups include plants, mammals, spiders and humans, cave-dwelling organisms, fish, aquatic invertebrates and algae.

Eastward to Tartary

Eastward to Tartary PDF Author: Robert D. Kaplan
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804153477
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Eastward to Tartary, Robert Kaplan's first book to focus on a single region since his bestselling Balkan Ghosts, introduces readers to an explosive and little-known part of the world destined to become a tinderbox of the future. Kaplan takes us on a spellbinding journey into the heart of a volatile region, stretching from Hungary and Romania to the far shores of the oil-rich Caspian Sea. Through dramatic stories of unforgettable characters, Kaplan illuminates the tragic history of this unstable area that he describes as the new fault line between East and West. He ventures from Turkey, Syria, and Israel to the turbulent countries of the Caucasus, from the newly rich city of Baku to the deserts of Turkmenistan and the killing fields of Armenia. The result is must reading for anyone concerned about the state of our world in the decades to come.

Blood Ties

Blood Ties PDF Author: İpek Yosmaoğlu
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801469791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
The region that is today Macedonia was long the heart of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. It was home to a complex mix of peoples and faiths who had for hundreds of years lived together in relative peace. To be sure, these people were no strangers to coercive violence and various forms of depredations visited upon them by bandits and state agents. In the final decades of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, however, the region was periodically racked by a bitter conflict that was qualitatively different from previous outbreaks of violence. In Blood Ties, Ipek K. Yosmaoglu explains the origins of this shift from sporadic to systemic and pervasive violence through a social history of the "Macedonian Question."Yosmaoglu's account begins in the aftermath of the Congress of Berlin (1878), when a potent combination of zero-sum imperialism, nascent nationalism, and modernizing states set in motion the events that directly contributed to the outbreak of World War I and had consequences that reverberate to this day. Focusing on the experience of the inhabitants of Ottoman Macedonia during this period, she shows how communal solidarities broke down, time and space were rationalized, and the immutable form of the nation and national identity replaced polyglot, fluid associations that had formerly defined people's sense of collective belonging. The region was remapped; populations were counted and relocated. An escalation in symbolic and physical violence followed, and it was through this process that nationalism became an ideology of mass mobilization among the common folk. Yosmaoglu argues that national differentiation was a consequence, and not the cause, of violent conflict in Ottoman Macedonia.

Spies of the Balkans

Spies of the Balkans PDF Author: Alan Furst
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812977386
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Greece, 1940. In the port city of Salonika, with its wharves and brothels, dark alleys and Turkish mansions, a tense political drama is being played out. As Adolf Hitler plans to invade the Balkans, spies begin to circle—and Costa Zannis, a senior police official, must deal with them all. He is soon in the game, working to secure an escape route for fugitives from Nazi Berlin that is protected by German lawyers, Balkan detectives, and Hungarian gangsters—and hunted by the Gestapo. Meanwhile, as war threatens, the erotic life of the city grows passionate. For Zannis, that means a British expatriate who owns the local ballet academy, a woman from the dark side of Salonika society, and the wife of a shipping magnate. With extraordinary historical detail and a superb cast of characters, Spies of the Balkans is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to fight back against the world’s evil.

The Last Journey of Ago Ymeri

The Last Journey of Ago Ymeri PDF Author: Bashkim Shehu
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810121115
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
In a remote Albanian village, a place of banishment, a stranger appears, claiming to be Viktor Dragoti and looking for his long-lost love. That Viktor Dragoti has been dead for nine years, killed by the Albanian coast guard while trying to swim to freedom, only adds to the stranger's mystery--and to the suspense of this curiously real and yet otherworldly work by one of Albania's most distinguished writers. With echoes of The Return of Martin Guerre and Kafka's The Trial, with allusions to The Odyssey and the Albanian folktale of Ago Ymeri, a legendary hero released from the underworld for one day, Shehu's novel blends the autobiographical and the historical, the personal and the political into a powerful tale--a story that conveys the terrors, small and large, of a totalitarian state while capturing all that is surreal and even lyrical in life in such a deeply distorted world.