I am very pleased that Stonehewer Books has decided to update and reissue my 1997 book of linked short stories, now called Buying on Time Again in the fall of 2025. See the proposed cover below.
This collection was serialized on CBC radio, and short-listed for the Leacock Medal for Humour and City of Toronto Literary Award. We added Again to the original title and I have also added an essay and a prequel I wrote a few months after the book first came out.
In other news Cormorant Books has picked up my latest novel, The Seaside Café Metropolis, for publication in 2026, so I will be deep in working on notes for the next season or two. Here is a summary I provided to the publisher:
The Seaside Cafe Metropolis is a comic novel set in Khrushchev-era Vilnius – it’s like a cross between The Grand Budapest Hotel and A Gentleman in Moscow. It tells the story of a Toronto expatriate from the Royal York Hotel stuck in Vilnius with his determinedly communist mother circa 1958. He tries to make the best of it by running a fashionable bohemian restaurant while the KGB listens in from the basement.
Food is a major concern in the novel, and each chapter includes a Soviet-era recipe.
Some of the plot elements are taken from true history, such as the visit from Jean-Paul Sartre, and others come from the novel upon which the opera, La Bohème, was based. I stayed in the real cafe that inspired this novel in 1975, and its interior has been preserved, so I recently dined there on Chicken Kiev. Some historic photos can be found at this site.
Noticed on the beach: someone was reading The Death of Tony.
Now that my knee has healed over the summer, I’m having a few appearances over the fall. I was in Michigan and then Huntsville, Ontario, to speak to Lithuanians about my memoir, The Death of Tony, and will be doing the same in Montreal in October, as well as an English talk at Librairie Paragraphe Bookstore.
The Estonians are doing a conference on the anniversary of the flight from the Red Army, and since The Death of Tony is at least partially about that, they have asked me to speak there as well. The Great Escape of 1944 – The Baltic Experience.
An Essay called “Barbers I Have Known” will appear in the very fine literary journal, Queen’s Quarterly.
I continue to scribble away on various writing projects but am also devoting a little time to the newest addition to the Sileika clan, baby Alma. See below:
Then I’ll have a couple of readings in Kaunas at the Maironis Museum and later with the Santara group.
And then it will be back to Canada for a slow spring and summer as I get used to a new knee, which means I’ll be hobbling along for a while, but should get better after that.
This autobiographical book-length essay has some light-hearted scenes about the immigrant experience, and then looks more deeply at what it means to be compelled by the past and lost in history.
Tens of thousands crowded into the Litexpo conference centre for the Vilnius book fair, and a few hundred came into my interview with Jolanta Kryževičienė to hear about the translation of Some Unfinished Business, called Nebaigti reikalai in Lithuanian.
The level of literary interest in this country is very high. Even a high school kid asked for help on how to work on one of my books.
I was asked by the Canadian embassy to interview Giller prize winner, Suzette Mayr as she passed through the book fair, and it was a great to talk to her about The Sleeping Car Porter.
Here is the poster for the Lithuanian movie adaptation of my novel, Provisionally Yours known as Laikinai jūsų in translation. And below that you’ll find a link to the trailer as well as a few pics. The premiere in Vilnius on November 23, 2023 was a blast! We’ll see if it can get over here next year.
The trailer is here:
Standing on a Vilnius street by an ad for the film.
On the red carpet at the premiere with lead actress Justina Nemanytė.
Provisionally Yours, will also be adapted in an 8-part TV serial in the spring of 2024. Here is a Lithuanian language newspaper article about it.
Below is a photo of me with the actors and crew on location in the spring of 2023. The director in white is Ramūnas Rudokas and the lead, Simonas Storpirštis, stands beside me. I wish I’d thought to ask after the other names, but it was all in a whirl. See a few more photos on the photos page.
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In December of 2023 I spent a week in Rome helping my publisher, Del Vecchio Editore, to promote the Italian translation of my 2011 novel, Underground, about anti-Soviet resistance in postwat Lithuania. Becauae of the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, interest was intense and the questions at various events were piecing both in Italian and in English, in Rome and in Naples.
A strange and dramatic cover for the Italian translation of Underground.
A wonderful event hosted by Anne Giardini in Rome, and supported by two embassies.
My latest novel, Some Unfinished Business was published by Cormorant Books in February of 2023. I am very pleased indeed.
I received a wonderfully supportive description of the work in the introduction to an interview I did with Open Book.
Some Unfinished Business is a novel based on historical events that tell the story of a rhyming assassin, underground resistance, and precarious love in the Soviet Union of the postwar era.
The Book Launch of Some Unfinished Business
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Here is a link to my most recent audio book review on Shelagh Rogers’s CBC Radio 1 show, The Next Chapter. I have reviewed Marius Kociejowski before, and I thought I’d had enough, but this erudite bookseller with a love for culture has an eye for eccentrics who are more interesting than the mainstream.
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A Chinese translation of Woman in Bronze, originally published in 2011, has just appeared .
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I was in Europe for much of the spring and summer of 2022. I had a few literary readings in Lithuania and in May I toured the translation of Buying on Time in Italy, translated as Tempus Fugit. Here is a link to some of the events.
I have just signed with the wonderful Italian house that did Tempus Fugit, Del Vecchio Editore, in order to have them bring out a translation of Underground in 2023.
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And in the meantime, here is a nice Lithuanian language profile of me that just ran on LRT TV. I’m on at about minute 2:20 and you may need to turn on sound.
On March 19, I officially launched my new novel, Provisionally Yours at Ben McNally’s book store in Toronto. The novel is now available in Canada and will be launched in the USA in June.
I’ll be reading from it at the GritLit festival in Hamilton, on April 13, at the Eden Mills literary festival in early September, as well as Windsor in May and other places to be announced.
Here is what the flaps have to say about the novel:
After World War I and the collapse of Czarist Russia, former counterintelligence officer Justas Adamonis returns to Lithuania, a fragment of the shattered Empire. He’s not entirely sure what he’ll find. His parents are dead, he hasn’t seen his sister since she was a teenager, and Kaunas has become the political center of the emerging state. He’s barely off the train when he’s recruited back into service, this time for the nascent government eager to secure his loyalty and experience. Though the administration may be new, its problems are familiar, and Adamonis quickly finds himself ensnared in a dangerous web of political corruption and personal betrayal. In its vivid rendering, Antanas Sileika’s Provisionally Yours is an exploration of nationalism and realpolitik—as well as an unforgettable story about treachery and the enduring human capacity for love.
“A perfect calibration of pace and depth, a lucid, stylish and bittersweet chronicle of a country’s rebirth, and a thriller that is also a meditation. I loved this novel.”—Samantha Harvey, Man Booker-nominated author of The Wilderness and The Western Wind
“Sileika is a master at portraying moral ambiguity. Set in an overlooked corner of Eastern Europe, Provisionally Yours has the gritty realism of a noir and the pacing of an espionage thriller.”—Nino Ricci, author of theLives of the Saints trilogy
“Offers the delightful unearthing of a little-known corner of the world—post-war Lithuania. Espionage, illicit love, bureaucratic bungling, marvelous descriptions of food and drink, strong women, desperate men. And subtle humour. And ultimately sadness, brought on by amorality in the struggle for power. A fine read.”—David Bergen, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of The Time in Between
I was at the Vilnius book fair again this year to launch my new novel, called Provisionally Yours in English and translated as Laikinai jūsų by the publisher, Baltos Lankos. It was a wonderful time as usual there. See the cover below:
But my memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller in English, and Basakojis bingo pranešėjas in Lithuanian, also published by Baltos Lankos, had been short-listed for book of the year there in the adult category. And it won! Here is a photo, of my receiving that award.
And finally, I launch my new novel in English in Toronto on March 19. Here is some news about that:
The Vilnius review has run a long interview with me, in which I respond to questions about the nature of my humour and write the story of Christmases (Kūčios) past and present, my Lithuanian answer to Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”
The Lithuanian translation of my memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, has been short-listed for book of the year in Lithuania.
The Lithuanian Translation of The Barefoot Bingo Caller, 2018
This is a readers’ choice award, so those who like the book can vote for it at this page. Simply click on the circle and make sure you choose the term, “įrašyti”, which means “enter”. The winner will be announced at the Vilnius Book Fair in February of 2019.
My next novel , Provisionally Yours, an espionage novel set in Kaunas in 1921, has a publication date of March 19, 2019. There is a little bit of information and a tentative cover below.
The Lithuanian translation will actually show up a month earlier at the Vilnius Book Fair.
Here are some of the events that I’ll be taking part in through fall of 2018.
September 21, 7 PM. Interview with author Dubravka Ugresic on the occasion of her new novel, Fox.
September 23, I’ll be speaking at Word on The Street on the subject of creative writing.
.November – December 2018 – I’ll try to stay in as much as possible to do a second draft of a novel in progress, whose working title is Skylark and Badger. I do some of my best concentrated work at the Toronto Writers’ Centre.
Snaige Sileika’s art show will be opening in Vilnius on May 31 – see details below – and I will be reading from the Lithuanian translation of my memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller. Come by if you are available for this rather rare Sileika double exposure.
The book fair in Vilnius was its astonishing usual self, 67,000 visitors over four days, and this in a city of half a million. The cab driver asked me what I was reading, passers by kept asking for signatures. The intellectuals asked if the event had not become too popular, a victim of its own success. Lithuania, and I expect much of the rest of Europe, continues to take books and writers very seriously in a way I have never seen here in Canada. Halls filled with over seven hundred people for stars such as Tomas Venclova and Kristina Sabaliauskaite, but even the small halls with talks on arcane subjects were full, and every hour on the hour I had a choice of seven or more talks. I had a couple of long television interviews and couple of radio interviews. Here is a link to one with the charming and whip-smart Juta Liutkeviciute, pictured below, but you need to have the language to understand it.
The Translation of my memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, has just been published in Lithuania and I will be presenting it at the February 2018 Vilnius Book Fair,
If you happen to be there and have the language, come out and see me interviewed on stage by Lithuanian television (LRT) on Friday, February 23 at 7 PM. Jolanta Kryževičiene has been interviewing me for years and she knows my work well, so I am looking forward to this talk. The interview will also run subsequently on television as will a couple of other interviews I will do both on TV and radio.
The Globe and Mail published a nice short review of my memoir and the Literary Review of Canada published a longer one, pasted in below. The jpeg of a magazine page is slightly hard to read, unfortunately..
It was a fun book launch, more like a wedding, many said, with a jazz trio and food and liquor and almost three hundred people. We sold a record number of books (213) and had a quick bingo game, won by my Humber replacement, the incoming David Bezmozgis, who tok home a mickey of Crown Royal Whiskey.
And now the first review comes in from Quill and Quire, Canada’s publishing industry journal, and it contains the much-coveted star. I have pasted in a photo that is a bit hard to read, but I’ll put in a link later if one shows up.
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