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Fall Comes from the Forest (Miškais ateina ruduo)
by Marius Katiliškis
424 pp. ISBN 978-0-9966304-9-8. Paperback.
Translated by Birutė Vaičjurgis Šležas
A tale of passion and deceit, set in Lithuania between the wars. A series of chance events dash a young man's hopes of a government job, leading Tilius to a temporary job at a farmstead where the woman of the house is young and pretty...
Bees on the Snow (Lithuanian title: Kalės vaikai)
by Saulius Šaltenis
158 pp. ISBN 978-0-9966304-5-0. Paperback. Also available as an ebook.
Translated by Elizabeth Novickas, with an introduction by Daiva Litvinskaitė
This novel inventively takes us to a mysterious time and place, possibly 18th-century East Prussia, and the life of a pastor based on Kristijonas Donelaitis, author of Metai, the first Lithuanian poem. In the madcap rush of the narrative, the reader is introduced to a host of characters whose moral struggles mirror those of more contemporary times, flavored with a dash of myth and legend.
With many thanks to the Lithuanian Culture Institute for their support
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Sun-Tzu's Life in the Holy City of Vilnius
by Ričardas Gavelis
271 pp. ISBN 978-0-9966304-3-6. Paperback.
Another intellectual horror story by the author of Vilnius Poker. In this, Gavelis's last novel before his sudden death at the age of 52, the master of the macabre takes us through the life of the Sun-Tzu of Vilnius, a warrior of the political and economic changes that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Sun-Tzu launches attacks on his enemies from his bunker hidden in the legendary underground labyrinths of Vilnius. A fantastic metaphoric voyage into the depths of good and evil.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Lithuanian Culture Institute.
Tūla
by Jurgis Kunčinas
232 pp. ISBN 978-0-9966304-1-2 Paperback. Also available as an ebook.
This remarkable love story, told by an unnamed narrator and at times in the shape of a bat, takes us through a world that was closed to the West, and furthermore, into a part of it we would have been unlikely to know even in our own society: the world of drunks, vagabonds, drifters, the mentally ill. Jurgis Kunčinas's eye for detail draws unforgettable pictures in his readers’ heads of Vilnius's Užupis district and its inhabitants, but above all, of a love cherished under the darkest of skies.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Lithuanian Culture Institute.
Vilnius Poker
by Ričardas Gavelis
438 pp. ISBN 978-0-9966304-2-9 Paperback.
A new paperback edition of Ričardas Gavelis's masterpiece, first published by Open Letter in 2009. A dark, enigmatic, and visceral examination of the psychology of repression, Vilnius Poker dives into the minds of four narrators whose contradictory memories challenge the very idea of truth. In this masterpiece written "for the drawer," during the Soviet era in Lithuania, Vilnius itself becomes a presence possessing a will, a consciousness and, worse, an intent.
Frank Kruk
by Petras Cvirka
232 pp. ISBN 978-0-9966304-0-5 Hardcover.
In this imaginary biography first published in 1934, Cvirka follows every detail of his hero Pranas Krukelis’s transformation from a barefoot Lithuanian village boy with a dead-ringer imitation of a squealing pig to the American businessman Frank Kruk, proprietor of a Brooklyn funeral parlor. On the way, Cvirka slings satire and slapstick in all directions, at just about every aspect of Lithuanian life and the immigrant experience. Think of something like a cross between Sinclair Lewis and Stella Gibbons.
The translation of this book was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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