Reviews

Writing that deals with reconstructing distant time periods is especially popular in contemporary Lithuanian literature. Such literature is usually called “historical.” And it is a logical choice of words: historical periods, in particular, provide narratives and characters with unique undertones, and they motivate and add meaning to the whole plot. On the other hand, in

We may regard Enrika Striogaitė as one such cultural participant that you may run into at many art places but never really get to know her. For many years now this poet, author of documentaries, and journalist has managed to appear in public with great stealth. In one of her rare interviews, she once stated

In Lithuania, literature engaged with social empathy appeared about a century ago when short stories and novelettes by Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė and Jonas Biliūnas, which have become classics, were written and published. The short story “Offering to God” by Petkevičaitė-Bitė is today known to every school-age child in Lithuania because it is being analysed in schools

I am not sure whether it would be proper to begin my review with a banality, considering that Šlepikas’s works can in no way be described as banal, but then again, if we agree that a one-person band can exist, I would consider Alvydas to be the No. 1 definition of such an individual. Author,

I recently came across a press release stating that “this year, the contemporary music festival Gaida will host a unique show commemorating the 50th anniversary of the launch of the legendary US spaceship Apollo and its moon landing. The song ‘Apollo’ by the legendary music producer and composer Brian Eno will be played live in Lithuania

When I must describe the poetry of Tomas Petrulis, I am at a loss for words. Perhaps it is a symptom of having come into contact with a unique poetic logic—a poetic logic of nonsense—an “Alice’s world,” though in Petrulis’s poems the Cheshire Cat is often also accompanied by Behemoth, part of Woland’s entourage. Petrulis’s

Sometimes, an incident appears so colorful that if we wrote it down, nobody would believe it. But the opposite can happen, too: fantasy starts to compete with reality.  Jurga Tumasonytė once confessed that when interviewing visionaries for women’s magazines, they would be so boring that she’d have to invent new, more exciting characters herself. This

In the annotation of Jurgita Jasponytė’s second poetry book The Sharp Gates of Dawn, the book’s editor, poet Aidas Marčėnas noted that these poems are inseparable from the region where the poet was born and from the cultural memory embedded in the language of that region. The statement is meaningful yet complicated, because it implies that

In Lithuania, Vaiva Grainytė is best known as one of the winners of the Golden Lion award at this year’s Venice Art Biennale (together with Lina Lapelytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė). She studied theater at the Vilnius Academy of Music and Theatre and lived in Beijing during 2010–2011, where she wrote her first essay book Pekino dienoraščiai (“Beijing

The king of the Lithuanian publishing market, like in other countries, is the novel. That is why short prose collections are of no real interest to publishers – it does sometimes occur that works written not only by emerging but even by established authors are passed between publishing houses for years. Such a fate befell