The Online Magazine for Lithuanian Literature

Editorial

Warm greetings to all of you, our critical readers and charitable critics. More than once I’ve been asked (as I’m sure all of you have as well): Where can I read your poetry? Your prose? Who are your most interesting writers? What is Lithuanian literature like? What is most important to the writers in your country?

Maironis

Details: Poetry; 01 December 2023

With such beauty the heart is freed
For the traveller who yearns to roam.
If only the eye could still see to see
The shores of Dubysa, my home.

Diana Paklonskaitė

Details: Poetry; 28 November 2023

a time when people were
not afraid of each other?

must be a bad joke

ask any rowan
by the road

Poetry of Freedom and Dignity: An Interview with Ukrainian Poet Halyna Kruk

Details: Interviews; 07 November 2023

The poems I wrote as I experienced the war were quickly translated into other languages. Then I received feedback from foreigners who wrote to me that my poems helped them understand what was going on in Ukraine. These are emotional and subjective poems that express a personal experience of war. That helps people understand because they can relate. My poems are a way of checking reality—both for me and for my readers.

Scar Tissue Surrounded by Astonishing Beauty: An Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch

Details: Interviews; 16 November 2023

Another reason my heart is embedded in Lithuania is this: the mythic has not yet been obliterated by capital. But the entire Baltic region remains an open wound too, with scar tissue, surrounded by astonishing beauty... I suppose all brutalities live right next to beauty.

Kęstutis Navakas

Details: Archive; 03 November 2023

each time I turn in here I feel as if
I live here – in this café
: it is so pleasantly smoke-filled here, stayed in
in each one here are several motes of me

Icchokas Meras

Details: Archive; 14 November 2023

My narrow shoulders were weighed down with all that had happened, and all that would happen, and I couldn't bear the burden any longer, for the load was so great, so I preferred not to go back halfway from the path which led to the pit, but simply to go on, till the end, but the path wasn't there, and I felt a sharp blow in my chest, like Jesus, in the same place, and I collapsed on the table, all laid as it was for Passover. Only after I was pronounced clinically dead did I become aware that I had knocked over the goblet of red wine and everybody, frozen, had watched as I bled.