Vermouth is an aromatized fortified wine, flavoured with various botanicals and sometimes colored. The modern versions of the beverage were first produced in the mid to late 18th century in Turin, Italy. While vermouth was traditionally used for medicinal purposes, it was later served as an apéritif, with fashionable cafés in Turin serving it to guests around the clock. In the late 19th century, it became popular with bartenders as a key ingredient for cocktails, such as the martini, the Manhattan, the Rob Roy, and the Negroni. In addition to being consumed as an aperitif or cocktail ingredient, vermouth is sometimes used as an alternative to white wine in cooking.
Brandy is a liquor produced by distilling wine. Brandy generally contains 35–60% alcohol by volume and is typically consumed as an after-dinner digestif. Some brandies are aged in wooden casks. Others are coloured with caramel colouring to imitate the effect of aging, and some are produced using a combination of aging and colouring. Varieties of wine brandy can be found across the winemaking world. Among the most renowned are Cognac and Armagnac from south-western France.
Ismail Kadare is an Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. He is a leading international literary figure and intellectual. He focused on poetry until the publication of his first novel, The General of the Dead Army, which made him famous internationally.
Caffè corretto is an Italian caffeinated alcoholic drink, consisting of a shot of espresso with a small amount of liquor, usually grappa, and sometimes sambuca or brandy. It is also known as an espresso corretto. It is ordered as un caffè corretto alla grappa, ... alla sambuca, ... al cognac, or corretto di Spadino, depending on the desired liquor.
Grappa is an alcoholic beverage: a fragrant, grape-based pomace brandy of Italian origin that contains 35 to 60 percent alcohol by volume. Grappa is a protected name in the European Union.
Albanian literature stretches back to the Middle Ages and comprises those literary texts and works written in Albanian. It may also refer to literature written by Albanians in Albania, Kosovo and the Albanian diaspora particularly in Italy. Albanian occupies an independent branch within the Indo-European family and does not have any other closely related language. The origin of Albanian is not entirely known, but it may be a successor of the ancient Illyrian language.
The File on H. is a novel by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. It was first published in Albanian in 1981 under the title Dosja H. Jusuf Vrioni translated the work to French in 1989 as Le Dossier H. David Bellos translated the French version into English in 1996. Both Kadare and Bellos have received praise in the English speaking world for the edition.
Norman Manea is a Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He lives in the United States, where he is a Professor and writer in residence at Bard College.
David Bellos is a British academic, translator and biographer. He is the Meredith Howland Pyne professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University in the United States, and was director of its translation and intercultural communication programme from 2007 to 2019.
The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (1990–2015) was a British literary award. It was inaugurated by British newspaper The Independent to honour contemporary fiction in translation in the United Kingdom. The award was first launched in 1990 and ran for five years before falling into abeyance. It was revived in 2001 with the financial support of Arts Council England. Beginning in 2011 the administration of the prize was taken over by BookTrust, but retaining the "Independent" in the name. In 2015, the award was disbanded in a "reconfiguration" in which it was merged with the Man Booker International Prize.
Amaro is an Italian herbal liqueur that is commonly consumed as an after-dinner digestif. It usually has a bitter-sweet flavour, sometimes syrupy, and has an alcohol content between 16% and 40%.
Davide Campari-Milano N.V., trading as Campari Group, is an Italian company active since 1860 in the branded beverage industry. It produces spirits, wines, and non-alcoholic apéritifs. From its signature product, Campari, its portfolio has been extended to include over 50 brands, including Aperol, Appleton, Cinzano, SKYY vodka, Espolón, Wild Turkey, Grand Marnier, and Forty Creek whisky.
Wine has a long history in China. Although long overshadowed by huangjiu and the much stronger distilled spirit baijiu, wine consumption has grown dramatically since the economic reforms of the 1980s. China is now numbered among the top ten global markets for wine. Ties with French producers are especially strong, and Ningxia wines have received international recognition.
Gaja is an Italian wine producer from the Piemonte region in the district of Langhe, chiefly producing a number of Barbaresco and Barolo wines, and later diversified into Brunello di Montalcino and "Super Tuscan" production. Its current owner and president Angelo Gaja is credited with developing techniques that have revolutionised winemaking in Italy, and terms such as "the undisputed king of Barbaresco", and "the man who dragged Piedmont into the modern world" have been applied to him, and whose Barbaresco wine is considered a status symbol on a par with Château Lafite Rothschild or Champagne Krug.
Rakı or raki is an alcoholic beverage made of twice-distilled grape pomace and flavored with aniseed. It is the national drink of Turkey. It is popular in many Mediterranean countries and is often served as an apéritif or with seafood or meze. It is comparable to several other anise-flavored liqueurs such as pastis, ouzo, sambuca, arak and aguardiente. The alcoholic content of raki must be at least 40%. The largest producer of raki is Diageo; Yeni Rakı is the largest brand.
The Palace of Dreams is a 1981 novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. Set ostensibly in the Ottoman Empire, but in a deliberately imprecise past shaded by myth and intended to represent the modern totalitarian state, The Palace of Dreams follows the rapid rise of Mark-Alem, a young Ottoman Albanian related to the powerful Köprülü family, within the bureaucratic regime of the title palace, a shady ministry whose objective is to gather, examine and interpret the dreams of the empire's subjects in order to uncover the master-dreams, which are believed to shell the future destiny of the Sultan and the state.
The Successor is a 2003 novel by the Albanian writer and inaugural International Man Booker Prize winner Ismail Kadare. It is the second part of a diptych of which the first part is the novella Agamemnon's Daughter. The diptych is ranked by many critics among the author's greatest works.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French author Annie Ernaux "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory". It was announced by the Swedish Academy on 6 October 2022. Ernaux was the 16th French writer – the first Frenchwoman – and the 17th female author, to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
