Syndicate: From John Hodgson: Albanian files

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Date: Sun, 19 Jul 1998 20:36:29 -0400
From: John Hodgson <100553.625@compuserve.com>
Subject: From John Hodgson: Albanian files

(..)

I am sending you here a part of the Editor's Presface from the Perpjekja
anthology and also a paragraph about the contents, rather than the table of
contents. Also a new contact address for myself, although the old one will
still find me.

My translation of Ismail Kadare's "The Three-Arched Bridge" will be
published in London at the beginning of next month (it appeared in New
York last year).  Fatos Lubonja's prison book "The Second Sentence" will
be published in New York next January. I am presently working on Bashkim
Shehu's documentary novel, "The Autumn of Fear."  Bashkim is Mehmet
Shehu's son, and his bood deals with his father's fall from power in 1981. 
It is of documentary value, as well as being a powerful story. I have not
yet found a publisher for it. 

-------

About the Albanian Cultural Magazine Perpjekja:

   "The cultural review Perpjekja "Endeavour" was founded in the autumn of
1994 by a group of intellectuals who felt the need to introduce a critical
spiti into Albanian culture.  This cultre has been dominated by what
Perpjekja has often called the ideology of national-communism.  Under the
influence of this ideology, the Albanians have bene more inclined to escape
from reality into an imagined glorious past, or into a future happy state,
than to look at themselves and reality in the eye.

   The idea of publishing an English-language anthology, drawn from the
first ten issues of Perpjekja, arose out of a belief that foreign readers
who are interested in Albania will find in its pages a new spirit and a new
point of view on Albanian culture and reality.

   The anthology includes a number of editorials from 1994 to 1997.  "For a
Critical Spirit" and "Albanian Culture and Pilot Fish" deplore the
neocommunist tendencies apparent in the Berisha years, as does Fatos
Lubonja's article "Freedom Still Under Threat."  The editorial "Pyramids of
Slime" analyzes the anarchy that overtook Albania dollowing the collapse of
the fraudulent financial schemes in 1997.  The anthology also includes
stories and prose by Fatos Lubonja, Fron Nazi, and Edi Rama, and cultural
criticism by Bashkim Shehu, Ardian Klosi, and Shkelzen Maliqi.

Copies of the anthology can be obrtained for $12 or 20 DMR including
postage and packing from:

   Fatos Lubonja,
   Rruga Qemal Stafa,
   Kopeshti 19, 
   Tirana, Albania.     e-mail:   perpjekja@openmedia.org.al


   John Hodgson,
   Flat 4,
   4, Pepper Street,
   London E14 9RB.    e-mail:  100553.625@compuserve.com