| "Mayo has an eye for the small details, the ironies of custom and tradition... Such richly diverse stories suggest a powerful merging of history and folklore with everyday life...In Lithuanian Wood contains many striking, poetic moments."
-The Los Angeles Times
"[Mayo] takes on topics that are often more difficult for us to approach. He provides sanctuary for characters who hold up the bones of murdered Jews, who don't find salvation in the West, who refuse to divide the world cleanly between Soviet and liberated Lithuania. Ready or not, Mayo has, as Crèvecoeur did for America, opened up our culture to wider interpretation." -Lituanus
"That Wendell Mayo is not an ordinary tourist having lost his way in Lithuania, but a very perceptive, educated citizen of sophisticated taste, is evident in many aspects of his book. . . . [f]irst of all, the cover of the book that depicts Anyksciu Silelis, a graphics piece mastered by Vytautas Valius . . . . It is even more impressive that in the beginning of several chapters and subsections the author squeezes in various mottoes, the largest portion of which he has taken from Lithuanian poets (Marcinkevicius) and our folk songs. . . . While borrowing the story "The Witch and the Rain" from Estonia mythology, Wendell Mayo is very successful in his efforts of intuiting the spirit of the pagan era..."
-Akiraciai (Translated from Lithuanian by Erika Sabo)
"In his beautifully achieved collection... Wendell Mayo explores the hard truths of the post-Iron Curtain era. Through the person of Paul Rood, who takes his enthusiasm for Walt Whitman to a country that has known only the depredations of Nazi and Soviet Tyranny for half a century, the reader enters into the recognition of what tyranny, with its attendant corruption, economic exploitation, and cynicism do to the human spirit. The keeper of keys at the lodgings where Rood and others stay cannot free himself of the petty and stultifying rules and bureaucratic turn of mind that have conditioned him for years. A former teacher become gravedigger, unable to find a spot free of the bones of murdered Jews, becomes obsessed by the femurs, fingers and skulls he continually overturns. Metaphorically, his burden is inescapable, for he is unable to find a place 'void of history.' The author has captured very astutely the mixed feelings that are a response to American optimism, innocence and good will - the sort of tolerant amusement that overlays deep anguish of experience. Yet the book...is filled with magic - with evocations and beauty and wonderful stories from traditional roots that, though damaged, still endure. It is a book of great humanity and splendid prose."
- Gladys Swan
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