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 "e;shot and buried with the proper honors,"e; 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, in which the experiences of life "e;are unrecognizably transformed, like the flour, eggs, nuts, and apples in a cake."e;