Articles

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 […]

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

You may have heard of Užupis, that run-down artists’ pocket of Vilnius, Lithuania, cut off from the Old Town by a bend in the Vilnelė (Vilnia), a pleasant little river if ever there was one and not too deep to wade across, as happens several times in Jurgis Kunčinas’s novel Tūla. You may have read

There have been Lithuanians in Canada and the United States writing in English about their immigrant lives for a long time, starting with the Canadian Antanas Šileika’s (b. 1953) Buying on Time (1997). There may be others even earlier, but at least this is the book that I remember best for its paradoxical humor and authenticity. Not

It is often said—and it is, of course, true—that not only do literary lists and various votes for books liven up the circulation of the literary field (the reactions, the despair, and the joy of writers and readers, the nerves and the illusionary feeling of involvement in matters) and shape readers’ tastes and the trajectories of

The trends of today’s literary field in Lithuania cannot be discussed without taking several important aspects into account. First of all, the re-establishment of independence in 1990 and the socio-cultural changes caused by it. The most crucial of these was the possibility of alternative voices, narratives, styles, and personal approaches. During the years of the