Reviews

I once had an opportunity to watch a theater play in one of Crete’s mountain villages, at the altitude of about 1500 km – I went there with a theater troupe of one of Greece’s universities. The students staged a play based on a 16th century dramatic text Erotokritos, which contains a scene of a Cretan fighting

There is this saying that’s been long used among acclaimed Lithuanian poets: a poet’s talent can be recognized from a single poem. And now Mindaugas Nastaravičius – a poet, playwright, and journalist – has written a book that only consists of a single one. Bendratis (“Common Wheel”) may seem a little pretentious at first, yet this expectation

The gently erotic poems of Denmark-based poet Rima Juškūnė are deceitful. Having chosen the iris as the most distinctive element of her debut book, she was tempting the readers to recall the sweet, sticky childhood candy and the careless symbolism of the woman as a flower. Yes, Juškūnė’s poetry may be called sensuous. It misleads those,

“I consider myself a poetry barbarian—my poems tend do have a certain rhythm, a passion,” says Kornelijus Platelis, the author of The Most Creative Book of 2018,  during his interview with a national broadcaster. His tenth collection of poems, entitled Įtrūkusios mėnesienos (Cracked Moonlight), was recognized as the most creative book of the year by the Institute

In Western eighteenth-century philosophy, with positivism as the prevailing school of thought, it was common to see the world was rational, orderly, and logically explainable—just think of Auguste Comte. Since the second half of the twentieth century, however, the belief in the omnipotent mind, philosophy, cultural criticism, and literature was lost, and people have come

Silence organized our family. There was always, for example, a great hush surrounding the years between 1941, the year Ona was deported to Siberia, and 1944, when her husband, Anthony, and their three children fled westward. –Julija Šukys, Siberian Exile In Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), author Julija Šukys

Jaroslavas Melnikas’s The Last Day (2018, Noir Press Ltd, translation into English by Marija Marcinkute) is a short story collection that sends the reader into the realm of the surreal. A granny ages backwards, an artist/musician’s house shrinks until he’s forced into ever smaller spaces, a traveler goes on a journey without knowing what his

When any historical era ceases to thrive, artistic and literary forms tend to gain a certain pretentious expression, reminding us that everything comes to an end eventually. The most salient sign of such an ending in the seventeenth century was Rococo architecture, which indicated that the grand Baroque period was concluding. If such art tells

In recent years, Greta Ambrazaitė’s work has been growing stronger, more varied, and more surprising. Increasingly, poets come to prominence not through the pages of cultural periodicals (for a long time, they were the main scene for debuts), but through social media or poetry slams. They reveal that poetry is a flexible way to communicate

Prosaist Gabija Grušaitė first novel, entitled Neišsipildymas (‘Unfulfillment’), came out in 2010. As a debut novel, it aimed high—the aspiration was to depict her generation (people in their twenties or slightly older at that time) living in the global and digital world. “This book will be liked by anyone who buys ecological food, spends at least three