Reviews

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

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

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

Giedrė Kazlauskaitė is not among those whose faces flicker in the public space, whose insights are published in the country’s periodical press, or whose voice speaks to you from the radio. She is the chief editor of the cultural publication Šiaurės Atėnai. Before that, she used to work as a book reviewer for national television

Rolandas Rastauskas (b. 1954) is an essayist, poet, playwright, translator, a participant in numerous international cultural projects, and a consultant to art festivals. He is a columnist for a number of Lithuanian and foreign dailies and magazines: he wrote for Atgimimas in 1989–1990, for the Lietuvos rytas from 1993 to 2003, for Akiračiai (Chicago) in 2003–2004, and from 2005 he has

Valdas Papievis has been living in Paris for over twenty years, and his prose can be recognized from a number of factors: ties with French culture, a minimalist plot, and a melodious and poetic narrative. Papievis’s reader must be patient and prepared for slow reading, when the dramatic highlight depends not so much on the

Lietaus dievas (The God of Rain), Alvydas Šlepikas’s short story collection, belonged to the same tradition of psychological prose of magic realism as the work of Juozas Aputis and Romualdas Granauskas, which recorded the dreary province of Soviet Lithuania and its neurotic personages. This thin book appeared at a time when the pundits of postmodernism declared

Ilzė Butkutė broke onto the Lithuanian literary scene in 2011 with Caravan Lullabies, winning the Zigmas Gėlė prize for best debut and making it into the Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore’s list of 12 most creative books of the year. Her poems exemplified a sonorous lyricism, lush with metaphor, that fit easily into the

The actress, poet, and playwright Daiva Čepauskaitė stepped into the field of Lithuanian literature at a time of change, when the Soviet Union was collapsing and independent Lithuania was emerging. She graduated with a diploma in medicine but has never been a practicing doctor. As an actress, Čepauskaitė debuted on the stage in 1990. Her

Eugenijus Ališanka (b. 1960)—a poet, translator, and essayist—stands out in the field of Lithuanian literature primarily because he is not a philologist. He graduated in math from Vilnius University. This aspect is frequently linked to Ališanka’s “intellectualism” or “constructivism” as his texts abound in philosophy, metaphysics, and echoes of literary theories. On the other hand,