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It's Christmas night, and Pastor Kristijonas has disappeared-so begins this magical, madcap tale of a pastoral Lithuanian community, weaving together myths, legends, and supernatural tales with the lives of ordinary folk. As the ghosts of the Lithuanian dead grapple with those of the newcomers from abroad, a bubbling teapot of passions erupts, and a timeless world is brought to life with humor and love, tragedy and horror.

“This book is not for the faint of heart,” Andrew Wessels has observed about Ricardas Gavelis’s Vilnius Poker, and this is all the more true for Sun-Tzu’s Life in the Holy City of Vilnius, the last work the Lithuanian master of the macabre wrote before his sudden death in 2002 at the age of 52. Gavelis, as always, ladles deeply from the wellspring of history, but the novel, although set inside the corruption and cynicism of Lithuania’s post-Soviet space, is horrifyingly prescient of today’s politics, when Russia is ruled by a KGB agent and the United States by a reality TV star. The novel takes the form of an authobigraphy of a man we know only as the Sun-Tzu of Vilnius, a child prodigy, revolutionary, and government puppet master, who retreats to an underground compound to wage war on the cockles of the earth. Be prepared for the Gavelis rollercoaster, as he weaves together a story of great loves and great hates, the mundane and the strange, the hunter and the hunted, the horror and the humor that startlingly erupts out of the blackest of situations. As Gavelis himself wrote about the book, “when good and evil intersect within a single person’s heart, expect hideous results.”

The unnamed narrator of Jurgis Kuncinas's Tula is our tour guide through the infamous poverty-stricken bohemian quarter of Vilnius known as Uzupis (literally, "beyond the river"), living his life on the fringes of society, including his journeys through various institutions for alcohol treatment. On the way we meet a number of curious inhabitants of this unique district, everyone from a chemistry professor with an exhibitionist problem to the descendant of a 15th-century Lithuanian hetman obsessively carving wooden masks all night long. It's a place where you're likely to encounter people walking both sides of the moral line, where one is just as likely to run into great kindness as unfeeling evil, and where the complex history and mix of cultures that make up the city of Vilnius constantly intrude into the present. But at the very heart of the narrative is the narrator's tragic love for the equally misfit Tula, a love the narrator carries with him, both figuratively and literally, throughout his chaotic existence. The action, which sometimes takes the form of the narrator's fantastic visions of visiting his love in the guise of a bat, includes a hitchhiking trip through Ukraine and Crimea, and takes place over a number of years spanning a good part of the late Soviet era.Considered a modern-day classic of Lithuanian literature, T¿la won the Lithuanian Writers' Union award for the best book of 1993 and is now in its third edition in Lithuania. It has previously been translated into Russian, Swedish, and Polish.Jurgis Kuncinas (1947-2002) was a prolific writer and translator whose work includes poetry, novels, essays, short stories, and children's books. His works have also been translated into German, Latvian, and Estonian and are particularly popular in Russia; a number of his works have been translated and there is even a fan site (in Russian), kuncinas.com.Elizabeth Novickas has published several books translated from the Lithuanian, including Ricardas Gavelis's Vilnius Poker, included on the long list for the Best Translated Book Award in 2009, and books by Kazys Boruta, Giedra Radvilaviciute, and Petras Cvirka. She is the recipient of a 2010 translation grant from the NEA and the 2011 winner of the Lithuanian Translator's Association St. Jerome Prize.

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,” Vilnius itself becomes a presence possessing a will, a consciousness and, worse, an intent. First published in 1989 when Lithuania was on the verge of breaking away from the Soviet Union, this book raised a firestorm for its brutality, frank sex, and its destruction of the myths of Lithuanian history.

In this imaginary biography, Petras Cvirka follows every detail of 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 in America. Think of something like a cross between Sinclair Lewis and Stella Gibbons. A classic of Lithuanian literature first published in 1934, the book has previously been translated into Russian, Czech, Latvian, and Estonian. This is its first English translation.