The Cucumber King of Kedainiai: Fictions
Publisher: Subito Press
Published: October 15, 2013
Place of publication: Boulder, Colorado
Language: eng
Format: Short Story Collection
Number of pages: 124
ISBN-13: 9780983115069
Description: Fiction. Characters in Wendell Mayo's collection, THE CUCUMBER KING OF KÉDAINIAI, are one of a kind. A Lithuanian mafia boss strives to achieve world domination with black market cucumbers. A starving Russian artist discovers he can profit by selling paint-by-numbers portraits of former General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Two spiders re-enact the Cold War years in the bathtub of an abandoned Soviet sanatorium. A woman is interrogated by former-KGB police about the whereabouts of an American she's never met. A man trades a bag of cold fried pike for clues about his Lithuanian ancestors. The concluding narrative, "The Universal Store," assembles all in a kind of marketplace of the heart, where the new realities of an Eastern Europe adapting to change since the fall of the Berlin Wall emerge. These stories by turn are not only dark, comical, and surreal.
Table of contents: title: The Cucumber King of Kedainiai, 1; title: Brezhnev’s Eyebrows, 25; title: Spider Story, 47; title: Goda, 63; title: Cold Fried Pike, 85; title: The Universal Store, 101