Epope Intime. Roman/ A Novel. Tirana: Pegi, 2024.
(prov. English title Our Threshing Floor Lies in the West)
Winner of the Great National Prize for Fiction
After the fall of the Berlin Wall — the scar that ran through Germany — many left Eastern Europe for the “West” and many contemplated departure. How to tell the stories governed by this persisting and almost mythical desire for the “West”? How to narrate what it meant for Albanians, a people who persevered during 500 years of Ottoman imperialism, a brief and brittle independence in 1912, two World Wars and nearly half a century of a communist regime? Our Threshing Floor Lies in the West (Alb. Epope intime) approaches this story through the lives of two cousins, both adolescents, trying to strike out on their own in the bewildering West. “Sever the roots you’ve grown in this tragic land. Build a new life out there in the West” is their parents’ advice. The narration follows the cousins during the 18 years they spend away from Albania and each other. When they meet again, the time for a reckoning has arrived.
Reviews:
“E. Karafili Steiner masters the art of wording and wields a masterly pen. She is made of the writer’s stuff and this comes to her naturally; which is why the reading of her novel is a beautiful peregrination, humanly and literarily speaking.” – Beti Njuma, September 2024.
“This is a very well-written novel, truly a book, and no one can bury their head in the sand. And the reader who takes it up will encounter a very good style, with a fanstastic written Albanian, that is, an Albanian contemporary yet quite fluid; the reader must ready themselves not to hold prejudices against its author or events.” — Enkel Demi, October 2024.
“An Albanian (hi)story, a tale of two times: of the yesterday isolated within boundaries that only birds could cross over, burdened with absurd pains and punishments, and of the today with its permeable boundaries, yet weighed down by old pains and new equally absurd ones.”– Arta Marku, November 2024.
Dhunë e Dhunti . Tirana: Botime Pegi, 2017.
(prov. English title: We Hoped for Good Fortune)
A crime must have been committed in the artist’s house on Hermosa Beach, California. There must have been, there could have been. The wife could have done it. This doubt haunts the philosophy professor Miljan Toska, the twin brother of the man found dead in the house on the beach. Arriving in Los Angeles for the reading of his brother’s testament, Toska revisits the house where the alleged crime occurred and, where years ago, he fell for Tesa, his brother’s wife, now widow. The scramble for the truth sends the living on a backward journey that must traverse their past as migrants from a little speck of land named Albania to the turbid “new world” of the United States.
Tokëmjalta. Tirana: Botime Pegi, 2025.
(prov. English title The Keeper of Lost Things )
“This novel by Enit Karafili Steiner rises as a dramatic pronouncement against the flow, setting out from the utterly unexpected premise that the good is as omnipresent as the soil; hence, we need not strive to import it, but rather pledge to shelter and nourish it; while evil cannot resist reformation, on the condition that we, like the novel’s characters, remain faithful to each other without compromise until the end.” – Ardian Vehbiu.
Translation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
This translation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is the first critical edition of the novel in Albanian, offering an introduction and explanatory notes.