"Visitors to Albania typically arrive at the modern Mother Teresa airport in the capital city of Tirana. A thirty-minute taxi ride brings one to Skanderbeg Square, the heart of the metropolis of some 850,000. Twenty-three miles from the coast on a lowland plain underneath mount Dajti to the east, modern Tirana is, on the surface, just another Balkan capital choked with traffic, shoddily constructed apartment buildings, cafes and restaurants - overwhelmed...

"Lament from Epirus is an unforgettable journey into a musical obsession, which traces a unique genre back to the roots of song itself. As King hunts for two long-lost virtuosos?one of whom may have committed a murder?he also tells the story of the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today. King discovers clues to his most profound questions about the function of music in the history of humanity:...

For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”―class status and other associations long in the past―put strict boundaries around one’s...

"In the late sixteenth century, a prominent Albanian named Antonio Bruni composed a revealing document about his home country. Historian Sir Noel Malcolm takes this document as a point of departure to explore the lives of the entire Bruni family, whose members included an archbishop of the Balkans, the captain of the papal flagship at the Battle of Lepanto--at which the Ottomans were turned back in the Eastern Mediterranean--in 1571, and a highly...