Ismail Kadare

An English translation of the second work by this well respected author. A story of Albania's struggle against the Ottoman Turks, involving the siege of a medieval Albanian fortress by the Turks in the 15th century, and the defeat of the Turks by Skenderbeg. Born and raised in southern Albania, Kadare grew up during …

The General of the Dead Army is a 1963 novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. It is the author's most critically acclaimed novel. It is noted that Kadare was encouraged to write the book by Drago Siliqi, literary critic and director of the state-owned publishing house Naim Frashëri.

The Pyramid is a 1995 novel written by Ismail Kadare, considered one of the greatest works produced by this writer, rivaling The Garden Party, by Václav Havel. It is considered to serve both literary and a dissident purposes.

Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder (a 'new fangled' invention) in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers. Their purpose, they say, is to show how Homer's epics might have been culled from a verbal tradition. But the local Governor believes its an …