The Cucumber King of Kėdainiai


Book Description

Fiction. Characters in Wendell Mayo's collection, THE CUCUMBER KING OF KEDAINIAI, 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, surreal but feel terribly true."




The Cucumber King


Book Description

Twelve-year-old Wolfi Hogelmann and his family lead an uneventful life until the autocratic Cucumber King suddenly appears from the depths of their cellar and throws himself on the mercy of the Hogelmann household.




Short Story Index


Book Description




The Cucumber Princess


Book Description

A tiny girl, hatched from an egg found in a cucumber field, demands to rule in the stead of the king, thus beginning a contest of wills and strength.







Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air: and Other Stories


Book Description

Making Love While Levitating Three Feet in the Air: And Other Stories’s 13 short stories are linked thematically by the recurring idea of flight, in its various definitions and senses. The characters are sometimes in flight from their situations, sometimes from other people, sometimes from themselves. Stories range from contemporary to historical, from realistic to magical realist. The known and the unknown often blur as the characters struggle to understand the unseen forces that move them. Ultimately, the crises that all the characters encounter are psychological or spiritual in some way, however each may define that; as the title of the collection suggests, the characters find themselves levitating somewhere between their deepest desires and an exquisite and terrifying nothingness. No one in these stories “wins” in the traditional sense; there are no tidy answers. But the stories are subtly life affirming in how each character deals with the difficulties of life. Each learns something about himself or herself, however fleeting that knowledge may be, however small a step forward it inspires. Life isn’t static, and neither are these people.




Moon-Face, and Other Stories


Book Description

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Moon-Face, and Other Stories" by Jack London. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.




Moon-Face & Other Stories


Book Description

Moon-Face & Other Stories' is a collection of American novelist, journalist and social activist Jack London. He lived form 1876 to 1916. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide fame and a large fortune from his fiction alone.