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. 

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. ...

“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 ...