Albanian Virgins: Women Who Spend Their Lives as Men

If you're literate, you've probably read and re-read to the point of memorization, Alice Munro's knock-out tale "The Albanian Virgin," so you'll be interested in photographer Jill Peters' recent project to document these mountain women who live as men. The tradition dates back at least to the 1400s, though with modernization encroaching, today far fewer women live this way. See nine in her portfolio. 

Munro's story is available in her three-decades-spanning Selected Stories, which, so rare in these endeavors, actually does collect her best work, including the first of her two gay stories, The Turkey Season. That piece appeared in The New Yorker in 1980, one year after Ann Beattie's half-gay story The Burning House and seventeen years before Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain.

Also if you're literate, you really should read Albania's greatest writer, Ismail Kadare, who won the first International Booker in 2005. Beware, even with his straightforward prose, he will bewitch you like Orhan Pamuk. Realists should start with his short, riveting Broken April [Kindle] which follows two strands: Gjor, a young man reluctantly caught in an ancient blood feud, and an intellectual couple honeymooning in the Accursed Mountains. More fanciful readers should try Chronicle in Stone [Kindle] or The General of the Dead Army or The Fall of the Stone City or The Palace of Dreams.