Image 1 of 1
About the author
Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best known novelist, whose name is mentioned annually in discussions of the Nobel Prize. He won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005; in 2009 he received the Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, Spain’s most prestigious literary award, and in 2015 he won the Jerusalem Prize. In 2016 he was named a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur. James Wood has written of his work, "Kadare is inevitably likened to Orwell and Kundera, but he is a far deeper ironist than the first, and a better storyteller than the second. He is a compellingly ironic storyteller because he so brilliantly summons details that explode with symbolic reality." His last book to be published in English, The Traitor’s Niche, was nominated for the Man Booker International.
About the translator
A native Albanian, Ani Kokobobo is assistant professor and director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas where she teaches Russian literature and culture. She has published an edited volume, Russian Writers and the Fin de Siècle – The Twilight of Realism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), a monograph, Russian Grotesque Realism: The Great Reforms and Gentry Decline (Ohio State University Press, 2017), and another edited volume, Beyond Moscow: Reading Russia’s Regional Identities and Initiatives (Routledge, 2017).
Book Details
Paperback ISBN: 9781632061744 • $19.99
eBook ISBN: 9781632061751
Publication date: Feb 20, 2018
5.5” x 8.25” • 304 pages
Territory: World all Languages
Praise
“Ismail Kadare’s first and only collection of essays translated into English, this time directly from the Albanian originals written between 1985 and 2006, offers profound and highly personal meditations on canonical figures of world literary history…. In his indelibly humanist understanding of art, Kadare conceives of literature—the work of canonically great writers—as art that ‘cries with the world,’ seeking through letters to understand the uniquely and most deeply human: tragedy, violence, pain…. The ‘world’ of Kadare’s three essays on ‘world literature’ is a reflection of Albania’s ‘impossible drama’ on the global scale of human history, an observation at once parochial and profound, like the greatness of great art.”
—Sean Guynes-Vishniac,World Literature Today
“In a raft of books since the 1960s, Mr. Kadare, now 82, has followed the example of the Greeks in all but impossible circumstances. He was Albania’s most renowned author under the Stalinist rule of Enver Hoxha, who presided over a regime of forced collectivization and ruthless suppression from the end of World War II until 1985. He is his country’s most renowned author still.... The collection serves as a kind of Rosetta Stone to deciphering his influences and motivations. These classics, he asserts, speak as much to the plight of Albanians as to anyone else.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“The Albanian author and perennial Nobel Prize candidate considers the roots and long influence of Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare, especially in his homeland. Kadare, who won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005, discusses the three authors through the filter of totalitarianism, particularly Albania’s oppression under a communist regime and the Kanun, a longtime legal code that effectively endorsed blood feuds…. [A]s windows into his own fiction, [the essays] show that he perceives his favorite themes—among them, oppression, loss, revenge—as part of a through-line that runs back to antiquity. A loose but informed and passionate study of why classic authors endure.”
“Essays on World Literature — consisting of studies of Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare — is the more fascinating because of the way Kadare looks at his subjects through the lens of his native land. Having been a backwater for so many centuries, Kadare asserts, Albania is closer to the world of Aeschylus and to the origins of tragedy than any other modern nation.”
—Christian Lorentzen,New York Magazine Vulture
“Kadare is one of the world’s great novelists: He won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005, the Jerusalem Prize in 2015, and numerous other literary prizes, while his novels have been translated into some forty-five languages…. The collection of three essays in Essays on World Literature prove the worth of a different gaze at figures as time-worn as Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare…. Restless Books is to be commended for having this volume translated (and quite ably so) by an Albanian translator, Ani Kokobobo.”
—Mitchell Abidor,Jewish Currents
“Through these three authors—Aeschylus, Dante, and Shakespeare—Kadare tours the history of Western literature, but also gives great insight into what it was like being an intellectual coming of age and finding his own voice in a Communist regime. If you’re looking for something to give you a view onto our world as well as insight into how literature can illuminate it—and how both are interconnected—this is a good book to go with.”
—Keaton Patterson, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)
“Legendary novelist Ismail Kadare's first book of nonfiction available in English, translated from the Albanian by Ani Kokobobo, is an enthralling reintroduction to some of the greatest writers of the Western canon—Shakespeare, Dante, and Aeschylus—as seen through a non-Western perspective. Kadare, who fled Albania’s oppressive regime, frames these writers' works through the lens of resisting totalitarianism and uses them as a clarion call for collective identity at a time when nationalism is on a frightening upsurge.”