Introduction
‘Where is it? Where’s the art? Where? Show it to me.’ These questions were once posed by Ričardas Gavelis, one of the authors presented in this special publication compiled for the 2018 London Book Fair, where Lithuania, celebrating the centenary of its restored independence, will be featured as “Baltic countries Market focus” for the first time. We do not know if we can answer him with a resounding ‘Here it is!’, without having to rummage for Lithuanian art under the table, like one of Gavelis’ characters from Vilnius Poker, but we do hope that an answer to the question ‘Where is the good Lithuanian literature?’ might be found in the pages of this special publication. Our goal is not to provide an in-depth study of the entire span of Lithuanian literary history, but rather to highlight authors and works that, in our view as editors, readers in other countries may find interesting. More and more, readers and academic critics are choosing to explore the periphery of world literature, not just the ‘central’ core of British, German, American and French literary works. The dramatic past century left a profound imprint on the literature of our small country, and while it may still be small in scope, for us this literature has emerged as a representative and substantial body of work. We hope you find the writings and contexts presented here both interesting and intriguing. We selected our authors based on a survey of experts and the current state of Lithuania’s publishing industry. As we are celebrating one hundred years of restored independence, we chose to feature writings from the past century that reflect a diversity of genres, resulting in a collection of representative examples of novels, essays, poetry, short prose and theatrical works. Some of the authors presented here as prose writers (including Antanas Škėma and Balys Sruoga) were also successful playwrights. As we selected our writings, the need to provide some historical context also became clear. As you will see, the majority of the selected works reflect Lithua-