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'It is not a recognized mental illness like agoraphobia or depression ... It's largely a matter of luck whether one suffers from border syndrome: it depends where you were born. I was born in Albania.' After spending his childhood and school years in Albania, imagining that the miniskirts and quiz shows of Italian state TV were the reality of life in the West, and fantasizing accordingly about living on the other side of the border, the death of Hoxha at last enables Gazmend Kapllani to make his escape. However, on arriving in the Promised Land, he finds neither lots of willing leggy lovelies nor a warm welcome from his long-lost Greek cousins. Instead, he gets banged up in a detention centr...
Wrongland balances on an edge of migration and return. It crosses from an Albania recently rid of Hoxha to a Greece riven by tensions that ultimately drive the protagonist on to America. But homecoming is the pivot -- one stuck in an unavoidable vying between alternate worlds. The reader, a simple stranger, is introduced to Ters, a city configured by remnants from the past, a locale scored by evil -- at times, gripped by good. --Gazmend Kapllani
A famous writer exiled from Albania and Greece. A Somali nomad-turned-multinational banker. An Asian-born virtuoso violinist with perfect pitch, and many more . . . In this eye-opening collection of immigrant trials, triumphs, and contributions, leading immigration lawyer Susan Cohen invites you to walk with her clients as they share their incredible journeys coming to America while overcoming unimaginable dangers and often heartbreaking obstacles abroad. Cohen masterfully uplifts marginalized voices, laying bare the remarkable realities of staggering hardships and inspiring resilience. Sprinkled with amusing anecdotes, tense junctures, and heartwarming segments, you will sit front and cente...
'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.
One of the 25 Books That Inspired the World (1989–2014), World Literature Today A remarkable and bracing collection of “classic anti-war writing” from a Croatian writer whose piercing prose recalls Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksander Hemon (Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize–winning author) Miljenko Jergović’s remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro, earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. In “melancholy, dreamlike” prose, the stories in Sarajevo Marlboro “recall Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but Jergovic’s book is the strongest of the three” (Maud Newton). Croatian by birth, Jergović spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. These stories are distinctly of the material world, and they are shaped by Jergović’s deeply personal vision, subterranean humor, and a razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city’s young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs—the minute details of their interior lives in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.
This book deals with historical consciousness and its artistic expressions in contemporary Greece since 1989 from the point of view that contemporary Greeks have been faced with the contradictions between on the one hand a glorious, world-famous yet distant past and, on the other, a traumatic contemporary history of wars, expulsions, civil strife and political and economic crises. Such clashes of imaginary identifications and collective traumas call for interpretations not only from historians but also from artists and storytellers. Therefore, the chapters in this volume explore the ways in which sensitive and creative perspectives of art approach and appropriate history in Greece. Through a...
Atlas of cartograms depicting European Union member countries and potential member countries, with countries' sizes skewed to represent statistical variables.
“His Words were Nourishment and his Counsel Food”: A Festschrift for David W. Holton brings together essays on Greek literature from medieval romances to postmodern fiction. It provides an illuminating first insight into the variety of Modern Greek literature for the general reader, while also catering to more specialised students and scholars with new research findings and close studies of individual texts. The editors and authors, all former doctoral students of Professor Holton at Cambridge, conceived this volume as a thanksgiving present to him on the occasion of his retirement and as a collection which reflects the high quality and significance of Modern Greek studies at the Univers...
Alice McDermott's brilliant first novel 'One of our finest novelists at work today' LA TIMES 'There's no one like Alice McDermott ... her touch is light as a feather, her perceptions purely accurate' ELLE Elizabeth Connelly sits in a New York office that looks like a real editor's, but isn't quite. Employed at a vanity press, Elizabeth watches the real world - of real struggles, passion, pain and love - spin around her. Until one day, a young writer comes to her with a novel about a man who loves more than one woman at once. And suddenly Elizabeth will be awakened from her young urban professional slumber - by a man's real touch and by a real story in search of an ending. This is a luminous novel of memory, revelation and desire.