July Nick's Pick

Nick has announced his July pick.

"Imagine a remote, superstition-gripped village in the mountains of Albania clinging to such a steep slope that when drunks fall off the sidewalk, they land on someone’s roof.

That’s the setting of Ismail Kadare’s Chronicle In Stone, newly updated, revised, re-assembled and published complete for the first time in English by Arcade/Hachette. The wonder-filled little town is based on Kadare’s Balkan childhood home, Gjirokaster. It’s a world where witchcraft is a practical concern, eyeglasses are considered shocking, and the severed arm of an English pilot can become a sacred relic.

Now under Italian rule, now Greek rule, now German rule, the characters in this little village loom as mythic figures in the eyes of the near-sighted boy narrator, whose whimsical imagination struggles to understand a world of resistance fighting and Allied bombing, a world where a girl who kisses a boy in public can disappear forever..."

Read all about it—and lots more—on his blog, Novelworld.

Nick book club will be discussing Chronicle In Stoneon Monday, July 30, at 7pm in the conference room at University Book Store (U District).