As was announced back in April, the bookstore is now open and you’re welcome to come and visit us at our new location at:
Galeria Nasional, Rruga e Barrikadave, 1st Floor
Tirana, Albania.
Since we currently have a very limited number of books in English we’re playing with the idea of offering customers the opportunity to sell their used English books so if you’re interested please email us or come by the store to talk to us. This is still an idea that we’re hoping will be viable for all.
It is with great pleasure that we announce our plans to open a new bookstore in Tirana, Albania. ShtepiaeLibrit.com has been serving you, our customers, for over two years now, but for almost that same length of time, our desire has been to improve our service for customers in Albania and we hope that the opening of this new bookstore will do just that.
At this stage we are still working on getting it ready. The bookstore will be located in an area near the center of Tirana, where we hope you come to visit us in the future. More details and announcement of the opening will follow in the weeks to come.
Iranian born and New York-based acclaimed artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat told IndieWire in a recent interview that she is working to transform the novel of Albanian writer Ismail Kadare into a movie.
“I have been very interested by another novel written by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, called “The Palace of Dreams”; this film will be made in English, and it will be most likely filmed in Eastern Europe,” Neshat said.
According to Neshat, the novel can serve as an allegory related to Iran in the way in which it could capture the way the ‘ruling party,’ the ‘state’ tries to control people’s imagination, even their dreams.
“I sense there are ways to explore the absurdity, the vicious fantasticism that threatens us today,” Neshat said, adding that: “With “The Palace of Dreams” I see a beautiful parallel in Albanian’s dark history and struggle with communism and the Iranian plight with the Islamic revolution.”
First published in 1981 in Albania, where it was banned, “The Palace of Dreams” unfolds as a parable about an all-controlling dictatorship that monitors even the subconscious lives of its citizens.
Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in the southern town of Gjirokastra, near the Greek border. He first studied at the University of Tirana in Albania, and later at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.
During half a century of Stalinist rule in Albania his works attacked totalitarianism and the doctrines of socialist realism with subtle allegories.
A perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, his novels and essays have been translated into more than 40 languages and have been awarded with the Booker International Prize for literature and the Prince of Asturias Prize, among others.
Albanian writer Ismaíl Kadare has been bestowed with the 2009 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters. The decision was announced by the Jury in Oviedo today.
Narrator, essayist and poet, Kadare represents the pinnacle of Albanian literature and who, without forgetting his roots, has crossed frontiers to rise up as a universal voice against totalitarianism. Regarded as one of the greatest European writers and intellectuals of the 20th century, his works have been translated into over forty languages.
Ismaíl Kadare, considered one of the greatest authors in world literature, was born in Gjirokastra, Albania in 1936. As a boy he witnessed World War II, the occupation of his country by Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, until 1944 when the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha was established in Albania. At the age of seventeen he won a poetry contest in Tirana, earning him an authorization to travel to Moscow and study at the Gorki Institute, from which he was expelled in 1961 because of the break in relations between the Balkan state and the USSR. Whilst attending the Muscovite institute he wrote The General of the Dead Army, which was enormously successful in France. Thanks to this novel, he obtained a sort of immunity in his country for representing national pride, even though he did not submit to communist dogmas. Forced by the regime, he was a member of the Albanian parliament from 1970 to 1982. In 1990, a few months before the collapse of the dictatorship, he exiled himself in Paris, the city where he has lived since, although he visits Albania frequently.
A great scholar of Albanian traditions and the idiosyncrasies of this Balkan state, his works take place around various incidents in his history, such as the break between Albania and the USSR, The Great Winter (1977); Catholic and Orthodox rivalries, Doruntine (1980); and the split between Tirana and Beijing, The Concert (1988). One of the most typical features of his work is that it is permanently open: Kadaré will rework his writings, poems become stories, stories grow and become novels and these, occasionally, will be reduced to stories. Another characteristic is how he recaptures Humanity’s great concerns and debates, taking them from oral tradition and classic literature, from Aeschylus, Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Chekhov, and placing them within a contemporary context.
However, the central theme of his work, expressed in each of his books, is totalitarianism, its mechanisms and the complicities that make it possible. This literary obsession reaches its climax in The Palace of Dreams (1993), published in Albania in 1981, when the communist dictatorship still governed. In this work, the Albanian writer builds an immense parable on despotic perversion, where in an imaginary country, a mammoth machine at the service of absolute power, the Office of Sleeping and Dreaming, controls the dreams of its citizens. Despite the fall of communism, Kadaré continues to give voice to the soul of totalitarian societies, such as in Three Elegies for Kosovo (1999) and In Front of a Woman’s Mirror (2002). His latest releases are Life, Death and Representation of Lul Mazreku (2007), Agamemnon’s Daughter (2003) and The Successor (2005).
He is a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of Paris, one of the five that make up the Institut de France, a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts and an officer of the French Legion of Honour. In 2005 he received the International Booker Prize. In addition, he received an honorary degree from South East European University (Republic of Macedonia).
The Prince of Asturias Foundation’s statutes establish that the aim of the Awards is to acknowledge and extol “scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanistic work performed by individuals, groups of individuals or institutions at an international level.” Consonant with this spirit, the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters “will be bestowed upon the person, institution, group of people or group of institutions whose work or research constitutes a significant contribution to universal culture in the field of Literature of Linguistics.”
This year a total of 31 candidatures from Albania, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Czech Republic, Chile, France, Holland, Hungary, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Macedonia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay and Spain ran for the award.
This is the sixth of the eight Prince of Asturias Awards to be bestowed in what is their twenty-ninth edition. The Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts went to Norman Foster, the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation was given to the World Health Organization, the Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences was given to British naturalist David Attenborough. The Award for Communication and Humanities went to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Scientific and Technical Research Award was jointly granted to American engineers Martin Cooper and Raymond S. Tomlinson.
Prince of Asturias Awards for Sports and Concord will be announced in September.
Each Prince of Asturias Award, which date back to 1981, comprises a diploma, a Joan Miró sculpture representing and symbolising the Awards, an insignia bearing the Foundation’s coat of arms, and a cash prize of 50,000 Euros. The awards will be presented in the autumn in Oviedo at a grand ceremony chaired by H.R.H. the Prince of Asturias.
Source: The official announcement
If you are Albanian or someone working on learning the Albanian language then I would encourage you to delve a little deeper into understanding the roots and the development of this ancient language.
To help you with this process, out of the many different sources out there I would direct you to one scholar whom many would recommend highly for his wonderful work, translations, study and research regarding the Albanian language and literature. His name is Robert Elsie and is one of those few people that has contributed and continues to contribute so much to this ancient language that I is my mother-tongue.
A most recent and very interesting development on one of his websites is the publication of audio recordings of the Albanian language spoken in different dialects in all the major areas where Albanians live today.
This is how Robert Elsie introduces the Albanian Dialects section, “This website offers the listener audio recordings in Albanian from various regions where the language is spoken. Though the dialects of Albanian are usually mutually intelligible to the listener with an ear for language, regional differences, deriving largely from the historical development of the language, can be substantial, and they are quite fascinating. You can thus listen here to people speaking in a wide range of Albanian dialects. Some of these individuals are good dialect speakers, others were recorded at random to give an idea of how modern Albanian is used in various areas.”
If you are planning on visiting Albania and or want to spend some time in Tirana, then you may want to consider getting a copy of the Tirana In Pocket city guide which is now available through ShtepiaeLibrit.com
Even, though we’ve lived most of my life in Tirana, there are so many more things and places that we do not know of or that we have not had the chance to go to.
Well, this little guide is quite handy in that way and we have had to use it for ideas from time to time.
Also, just to let you know, there are other city guides being prepared and we plan on adding them here. However, this depends on your interest, so please let us know by posting a comment here.
it is our desire and goal to serve as best as we can all our customers and visitors. However, more than that we want to serve you, as a friend of the Albanian book.
Since we already have a blog in Albanian where we post about different topics of interest to our Albanian friends and visitors, we thought it would be of value to you, to offer such a space in English as well. And here it is, what more can we say.
Reduced shipping rates to the American, Australian and Asian continent
Now you may benefit from economy shipping rates for orders going to the American, Australian and Asian continent countries. In short, if you want to ship books to the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, New Zeland, Japan, China, etc., then make sure to choose the ground shipping rates (economy rates).
Improved English language pages
Another very important improvement was the updating of our English page instructions and labels. In the past this was a problem as many of the page instructions were still in Albanian, thus making it hard to get oriented.
Albanian writer 
