The Cucumber King of Kedainiai - Wendell Mayo

Praise for The Cucumber King of Kedainiai

The Cucumber King of Kedainiai presents six wry, strange, funny, sad, and beautifully-composed stories. In Mayo’s conjuring of contemporary Lithuania, characters reckon with Soviet ghosts, estrangement, economic class, beauty, pigeons, the eyebrows of General Secretary Brezhnev, and the fabulous weirdness of globalism. This is a significant, exceptional, ravishing book, and might be Mayo’s best yet.

~ ANTHONY DOERR

Nobody writes like Wendell Mayo. His dazzling, funny, soulful, brilliantly worded stories of post-Soviet Lithuania are exemplary for any writer who has lived, really lived, as a stranger in Eastern Europe, or for that matter inside of any anxious foreign culture. Like me, such a writer yearns to write about the mystery country faithfully, with full powers of observation engaged, and yet at the same time imaginatively, with one’s own clownish self intact. In Mayo’s Lithuania there is always the brilliant portraiture of the wreckage of Communism, with its peculiar melancholy and lingering paranoia, its broken buildings, damaged pride and contorted economy, and at the same time there is love for some ravishingly difficult woman, a forever anguished love, wildly romantic and generally thwarted. If I could figure out Mayo’s secret formula for writing fiction that accommodates both these strains, I would steal it in a minute; instead, I gape with wonder at these supple and marvelous tales.

~ JAIMY GORDON

We all come from beneath the overcoat, and Wendell Mayo—that expert tailor, that quilter deluxe—rips out the moth-eaten “seems” of the short story, hemming up, in these blue tissue patterns, the sad sadness of the threadbare Baltic. These fictions warp and woof! You want to hold them close to your skin—in comfort, as dressing. Raw silk. Worsted wool.

~ MICHAEL MARTONE