Books by Ismail Kadare and Complete Book Reviews

Ismail Kadare, Author New Amsterdam Books $17.95 (248p) ISBN 978-0-941533-57-7
Honeymooners in the mountains of Albania and a young man playing out a blood feud set the stage for this mesmerizing tale. Ordered by his father to obey the mandates of Kanun , or mountain law, Gjorg Berisha kills a a man to avenge the murder of his
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Ismail Kadare, Author Arcade Publishing $17.95 (128p) ISBN 978-1-55970-528-8
In 1389, a battle was fought against the Ottoman Turks at Kosovo, ending in a momentous standoff that amounted to a defeat for the Balkan defenders. According to Serb tradition, in a nationalist legend inflamed and exploited by Slobodan Milosevic,...
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Ismail Kadare, Author William Morrow & Company $19 (205p) ISBN 978-0-688-11183-0
First published in 1981 in Albania, where it was immediately banned, this hallucinatory novel unfolds as an extended parable about an all-controlling dictatorship that monitors even the subconscious lives of its citizens. The setting is 19th-century
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Ismail Kadare, Author William Morrow & Company $25 (443p) ISBN 978-0-688-09762-2
Set in the mid-1970s, as the alliance between Albania and Communist China unravels, this subversively inventive satire traces the impact of the zigzagging Albanian party line on the personal lives of a group of friends and associates. These include...
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Ismail Kadare, trans. from the Albanian by John Hodgson. Grove, $24 (176p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2068-7
In his latest novel, Kadare (The Ghost Rider) features many of his motifs—bloody Balkan histories; bleak totalitarianism lives under silky threads of magical realism—that have made him a perpetual shortlister for Noble Prize laureate. This novel,...
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Ismail Kadare, Author, David Bellos, Translator , trans. from the French of Jusef Vrioni by David Bellos. Arcade $23.95 (182p) ISBN 978-1-55970-635-3
Working at the intersection of allegory and reality, Kadare (The Three-Arched Bridge, etc.) balances the forces of expression and repression in his latest novel, about an Albanian artist who struggles to keep his sense of equilibrium when the post-Co
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Ismail Kadare, Author, David Bellos, Translator , trans. from the French of Tedi Papavrami by David Bellos. Arcade $24 (207p) ISBN 978-1-55970-773-2
In 1981, on a December night, the designated successor to Albania's tyrannical "Guide" died of a gunshot wound; the Albanian news reported it as a suicide, but rumors spoke of murder. The search for the story of that night spirals inward
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Ismail Kadare, trans. from the French by Jusuf Vrioni and David Bellos. Grove, $26 (208p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2311-4
Back in the days of the USSR, the regime maintained a literary institute in Moscow for young writers from the vast region it dominated. On the evidence of Kadare’s (The Fall of the Stone City) early autobiographical novel, the writers, including a...
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Ismail Kadare, Author, David Bellos, Translator, Tedi Papavrami, Other . Arcade $24 (226p) ISBN 978-1-55970-788-6
Kadare won the Man Booker International Prize last year for his searing documentation, in numerous works, of Albanian history and politics, particularly life under Communism (The General of the Dead Army, etc.). This miscellany contains the title...
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Ismail Kadare, Author, Jusuf Vrioni, Translator, David Bellos, Translator , trans. from the French of Jusuf Vrioni by David Bellos. Canongate $24 (328p) ISBN 978-1-84767-185-1
First published in Albania in 1970 and translated into French in the '90s, Kadare's (The Successor ) beast of a novel traces a 15th-century Ottoman siege of a Christian citadel in Albania. Ugurlu Tursun Pasha is commander-in-chief of a...
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Ismail Kadare, Author, Jusuf Vrioni, Translator, David Bellos, Translator Arcade Publishing $23.95 (192p) ISBN 978-1-55970-401-4
Controversial Albanian dissident Kadare (The Concert) takes on the big H, Homer, in this comic tale of small-town suspicions and a doomed academic venture. The time is the 1930s, and Albania is already in a state of paranoia under King Zog, with...
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Ismail Kadare, Author, Jusuf Vrioni, Translator, David Bellos, Translator Arcade Publishing $21.95 (160p) ISBN 978-1-55970-314-7
Albanian novelist Kadare (The Concert), living in political exile in France since 1991, spins cogent tales about the temptations and evils of totalitarian bureaucracy. His latest carries a universal message. Set in ancient Egypt-where Pharaoh Cheops
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Ismail Kadare, Author, Asmail Kadare, Author New Amsterdam Books $19.95 (277p) ISBN 978-0-941533-00-3
Albania, that remote, unknown land, has found its voice in the novels of Kadare. In this one, the first of a forthcoming series, he takes as his subject the shattering impact of World War II as that cataclysm is lived by a small, immensely sensitive
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Ismail Kadare, trans. from the French by Jon Rothschild. Canongate (IPG, dist.), $13.95 trade paper (224p) ISBN 978-1-84767-341-1
Man Booker International Prize–winner Kadare (Broken April) takes an ancient Albanian tale, "The Ballad of Constantine and Doruntine," as the starting point for this compelling if enigmatic novel set in medieval Albania. The deaths of the nine...
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Ismail Kadare, trans. from the Albanian by John Hodgson, Grove, $24 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8021-2995-6
Man Booker International–winner Kadare (The Siege) builds a strange world out of a "most ordinary" traffic accident. Diplomat Besfort Y. and his longtime girlfriend, Rovena, are killed in a Vienna taxi accident after distracting the driver by "trying
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Ismail Kadare, Author, John Hodgson, Translator Arcade Publishing $21.95 (160p) ISBN 978-1-55970-368-0
Set in 14th-century Albania, this elliptical novel chronicles the events surrounding the construction of a bridge to illustrate the bitter history of cultural enmity in the Balkans. The book is presented as the account of a monk named Gjon, who...
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Ismail Kadare, trans. from the Albanian by John Hodgson. Counterpoint, $16.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-64009-608-0
Why did Joseph Stalin call novelist Boris Pasternak in 1934 to ask him about Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam’s recent arrest? That obscure historical mystery animates this enigmatic outing from Kadare (The Doll: A Portrait of My Mother), who presents 13
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Ismail Kadare, trans. from the Albanian by John Hodgson. Counterpoint (PGW, dist.), $260 (192p) ISBN 978-1-61902-916-3
A middle-aged writer’s oblique connection to a young suicide is the avenue by which Kadare (The General of the Dead Army) provocatively explores the intrusive Albanian state apparatus of the 1980s. When the Party Committee summons writer Rudian...
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Ismail Kadare, trans. from the Albanian by John Hodgson. Counterpoint (PGW, dist.), $25 (208p) ISBN 978-1-64009-044-6
Forty years after its first publication, Kadare’s magisterial novel is available in English. Set during the height of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople, the novel opens by introducing Abdullah, who tends to the niche in a Constantinople square...
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Ismail Kadare, trans. from the Albanian by John Hodgson. Counterpoint, $16.95 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-1-64009-422-2
Kadare’s wistful, introspective family portrait (after A Girl in Exile) combines fiction and memoir as he recollects his childhood in Gjirokastra, Albania, and early writing career in Tirana while imagining his mother’s early life. Kadare calls his...
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