In Brief
March 30, 2009

Vilnius Poker

By Christopher Byrd
Christopher Byrd

While reading Ricardas Gavelis's Vilnius Poker, a line from Joyce's Ulysses surfaced in my memory, "Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end." On at least six occasions, Gavelis (1950-2002) name-checks the Irish Zeus who commemorated the capital of his homeland by besieging it with the distorting optics of his prose. What Joyce did for Dublin, Gavelis has in mind to do for the capital of Lithuania: chide it, gossip about it, and bore it into the memory of those who may never visit it. His point man in this mission is Vytautas Vargalys, an unhinged library archivist. A survivor of a labor camp, Vargalys is convinced that a demonic They, " metaphysical tribe that broke off from the human family in times past," are the ghosts in the machi...

Daybook

June 18: George Orwell's "As One Non-Combatant to Another" was published on this day in 1943. Orwell's poem arguing against pacifism quotes from Churchill's "finest hour" speech, delivered to Parliament and the nation on this day in…

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In the Margin

Very few debut novels exhibit the charm, assurance, emotional depth and bravura fabulation which the lucky reader will discover in Helene Wecker's

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