Young poets frequently feel the responsibility to rebel. They do not write like the older generation of poets, they break the form of the poem, and their creative work is an amplified mouthpiece of their position. Recently, however, a curious tendency has been observed in Lithuania: young poets are seemingly looking to return to tradition […]
Emotion Conveyed with Precision Read More »
searching for the basilisk go straight ahead for a third of life to where a certain city stands you’ll smell it from afar incontinent with age with cemeteries under foundations pickles and potatoes in cellars from the last war where blind eyes sprout pale shoots and glass jars lie ruptured among dynasties of rats older
Eugenijus Ališanka Read More »
This never happened, but it could have. I dedicate my book to the Conqueror The Alpha Star, or Polaris, and the Little Dipper Polaris is the brightest star in the constellation of Ursa Minor. To be more precise, it’s a system of three stars, comprising one super-giant star with a luminosity that varies cyclically, and
Rasa Aškinytė, a historian and philosopher, is the author of four novels. Žmogus, kuriam nieko nereikėjo (The Man Who Needed Nothing), voted the 2014 Book of the Year, was the most successful. Critics emphasize the conditionality and irony of her prose. The author calls the style of her novels psychedelic. The model of Aškinytė’s artistic world is
A Somewhat Ironical Novel about the Aestii Read More »
Ten years. This is how long it has taken for the following myths to be debunked: that there are no comics in Lithuania, that nobody knows how to create them, that the market is flooded with poor-quality Japanese publications intended for children and teenagers, or by Spiderman and X-men, which are part of pop-culture and possess no artistic
The Search for Lithuanian Comics: (No Longer) Shameful Post-independence in Gertrūda Read More »
In memoriam L. C. The First: on teachers and students, on ecological niches and being yourself Forging unites metals, a purpose unites beasts and birds, fear and greed unite fools, a view unites honest people I always wanted to write you letters. In this tumultuous time, as everyone chatters over another, failing to listen to
Ričardas Gavelis (1950–2002), a prose writer, playwright, and columnist, is often named one of the most prominent writers of his generation. He outstandingly depicted the Soviet system, was its harshest critic in Lithuanian literature, and chronicled Vilnius in the early years of the independence. Without him, neither the map of Lithuanian prose of the late
Ričardas Gavelis and His Memoirs: Exposing Life in Soviet Phantasmagoria Read More »
The Lithuanian literary essay is a genre in which a fragmentary short text combines certain traces of a historical time, the symbols of the writer’s own and other cultures, and original autobiographical writing. Unlike in the Western tradition of this genre, the Lithuanian literary essay does not deal with the themes frequently found in journalistic
The Lithuanian Contemporary Literary Essay Read More »
What would a Horatio Alger story look like if it were written by a Lithuanian communist who had never been to the United States and who was determined to sling satire in all directions? Frank Kruk by Petras Cvirka, ably translated by Elizabeth Novickas, would be the answer. In the space of this novel, the eponymous hero
Vitalija Pilipauskaitė-Butkienė, a litterateur and literary critic, a graduate from and a doctoral student at the Faculty of Philology of Vilnius University, was born in the 1980s. She chose women’s literature as the subject of her doctoral dissertation and was pushed towards women’s experiences, motherhood, attachment parenting, and the work of doulas by factors in
Honey and Wormwood: A New Book on Women’s Experiences Read More »
