Byzantine Lit. 750 AD - 2005 AD: Balkan and Turkish Authors
Explore curated Byzantine and Balkan literature from 750 AD to 2005 AD, featuring iconic works by Orhan Pamuk, Ismail Kadare, and Milorad Pavic, including My Name Is Red and Dictionary of the Khazars.
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Dictionary of the Khazars (M)
by Milorad Pavic
A national bestseller, Dictionary of the Khazars was cited by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.
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Landscape Painted with Tea
by Milorad Pavic
By the author of the highly acclaimed literary bestseller Dictionary of the Khazars, this is a tale of a mysterious quest that is part modern Odyssey and part crossword puzzle. It begins with the story of a brilliant but failed architect in Belgrade and his search for his father, an officer who vanished in Greece during World War II. The truth about his fate—some of it set in motion 2,000 years ago and some of it by the Nazis—is raveled in the history and secrets of Mount Athos, the most ancient of all monasteries, perched atop its inaccessible mountain on the Aegean. “A hugely ambitious, playful, inventive, demanding, magical, linguistically sensuous reading experience.”—The Washington Post “A brilliantly playful and haunting novel.”—The New York Times Book Review
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My Name Is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
The Nobel Prize winner and one of today's most prominent contemporary Turkish writers delivers a novel that is a fiendishly devious mystery, a beguiling love story, a brilliant symposium on the power of art, and a “modern classic … rich and essential” (Los Angeles Times Book Review)—set amid the splendor and religious intrigue of sixteenth-century Istanbul. The Sultan has commissioned a cadre of the most acclaimed artists in the land to create a great book celebrating the glories of his realm. Their task: to illuminate the work in the European style. But because figurative art can be deemed an affront to Islam, this commission is a dangerous proposition indeed. The ruling elite therefore mustn’t know the full scope or nature of the project, and panic erupts when one of the chosen miniaturists disappears. The only clue to the mystery—or crime?—lies in the half-finished illuminations themselves. Part fantasy and part philosophical puzzle, My Name is Red is a kaleidoscopic journey to the intersection of art, religion, love, sex and power. Translated from the Turkish by Erda M Göknar
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The File on H.
by Ismail Kadare
A political comedy on two American academics who are recording story-singers in Albania. The two are on a project to show that story-singers were the source of Homer's epics, but this is much too highbrow for the district governor, convinced the pair are spies. By an Albanian writer, author of The Concert.
