Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again

In ten of her best essay-stories, Giedra Radvilaviciute travels between the ridiculous and the sublime, the everyday and the extraordinary. In the place of plot, which the author claims to have had “shot and buried with the proper honors,” the reader finds a dense, subtly interwoven structure of memory and reality, banalities and fantasy, all served up with a good dollop of absurdity and humor. We travel from the old town of Vilnius to Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, from the seaside to a local delicatessen, all in a narrative collage as exquisitely detailed as a bouquet of flowers. As in all of her work, Radvilaviciute plays with the genres of fiction and nonfiction, essay and short story, leading the experiences of life to be “unrecognizably transformed, like the flour, eggs, nuts, and apples in a cake.”