Reviews

Only about a hundred years old, the dystopian novel is one of the newest forms of narrative in Western literature. This genre’s writers boldly predict a future that, as both the narrator and the reader would wish, would be better unrealized. The dystopian novel thus speaks of an undesirable future reality. For centuries, the mimetic

In the Lithuanian cultural scene, Auris Radzevičius-Radzius (1965–2019) is known first as a visual artist and only then as a writer. During his life Radzevičius published just the one poetry book titled Ornamentas vietoj laivo (Ornament Instead of a Ship, 1990) as part of the Lithuanian Writers’ Union’s First Book series. Over time, it became

Dovilė Bagdonaitė made her debut with the collection of poems Mėlynojo banginio širdis (The Heart of the Blue Whale) after winning the First Book competition organized by the Lithuanian Writers’ Union. I was curious to see how her literary career would develop further: when I was reading her first book, I felt that Bagdonaitė had

If contemporary Lithuanian literature (or Lithuanian literature in general) has any examples of intellectual fiction, without a doubt one such example is a novel by Tomas Vaiseta, titled Ch and published in 2021. Vaiseta is a historian and author of books on Soviet Lithuania, so it is no surprise that he constructs his novel through

Since publishing her first book of poetry, Greta Ambrazaitė has been known for her unique voice and as a representative of the contemporary Lithuanian literature scene. Her poetry is marked by its distinctive aesthetic of darkness and the author’s metaphorically dense language. Ambrazaitė’s poetic debut Fragile Things (Lithuanian Writers’ Union Publishing House, 2018) encompassed a wide thematical

Western literary scholars usually divide poetry into two categories: poems dominated by nouns and poems dominated by verbs. In Lithuanian literature, the best-known representatives of the former are poets Tomas Venclova and Jonas Mekas. Both are émigré poets, having left their native country for the United States of America, yet both use nouns in their

Birutė Grašytė-Black has won the First Book Contest (poetry section) organized by the Lithuanian Writers’ Union. I spoke with the author last year and wished her luck in the contest. I had already heard and read some of her work – Birutė’s poems are vivid and laconic yet capacious, and I recall in them the

When discussing an autofictional novel, a reviewer can perhaps allow herself to introduce some elements of autoreview in her text. I write primarily in Lithuanian, and I am thinking in “translation mode” because I will translate it into English myself, inserting words and idioms that don’t exist in Lithuanian. My thinking in Lithuanian turns out

This spring, Slinktys Publishers released the poetry collection Procesija (Procession), the poet, essayist, and literary critic Gintaras Bleizgys’s fourteenth book. Although Bleizgys has tried out a number of literary genres and is a prolific and versatile author, his collection Procesija, published after a pause of several years, marks a new stage in his work. In

Today’s young generation of Lithuanian poets primarily writes confessional poems dealing with the effects of trauma. The works are dominated by marginal situations, psychological conditions, fears, and the inner barriers hindering the life of the modern person. The real – partly psychoanalytical – aim of such works is to document that which the author themselves