# Antanas Sileika

> the official author site


## Posts

- [On Writing Underground - on Writing History](https://antanassileika.com/on-writing-underground-on-writing-history/): The first of my  series of brief essays on the background of my latest novel and on writing historical literature in general appears online at the National Post today.
- [Back on the wheel of Fortune](https://antanassileika.com/back-on-the-wheel-of-fortune/): Now that my new novel is out, I’ll run a few weeks of commentary about what it is like through the ups and downs of public life after years of seclusion at the writing desk. Of course, I’m frequently out and about for literary events, but they are not my own and therefore less fraught.  […]
- [National Post Calls Underground "Irresistible"](https://antanassileika.com/national-post-calls-underground-irresistible/): Philip Marchand reviewed Underground in the National Post Today. The hard copy of the newspaper has a large sketch of me  labelled “Irresistible”. It’s a page I wish I could send to some of the girls I admired in high school. To critique the critique, the review does insist that I am not writing humour […]
- [Novel Excerpt at  the National Post](https://antanassileika.com/novel-excerpt-ay-the-national-post/): See a preview of my novel, Underground, in the  National Post.
- [The Lands Between - Part Two](https://antanassileika.com/the-lands-between-part-two/): Alexander Prusin’s The Lands Between is a study of the lands between Germany and Czarist and Soviet Russian from 1870 to 1992. The map above, of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, loosely covers the area that both he and Timothy Snyder write about. I’ve discussed his particular take on the postwar anti-Soviet partisan resistance in that area, […]
- [Blog Tour Now On](https://antanassileika.com/blog-tour-now-on/): Underground is a historical literary thriller with elements of espionage and romance. It’s set a very short time ago, just after the second word war, but in a part of Europe whose stories are untold and whose geography  is obscure to most of us on this side of the Atlantic. What are lovers in this […]
- [Stepping back for a Long, Hard Look](https://antanassileika.com/stepping-back-for-a-long-hard-look/): A new overview of the territory between Russia and Germany has just appeared, called The Lands Between, (Conflict in the East European Borderlands, 1870 – 1992), by Alexander V. Prusin. This history covers some of the same territory as Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands with a few differences. For one, Prusin’s book is almost three times more […]
- [Gossip at my Creative Writing Posts Over at Humber](https://antanassileika.com/gossip-at-my-creative-writing-posts-over-at-humber/): I’ve been posting on creative writing and gossip about literary events at my Humber School for Writers blog. Come on over and see what I’m up to over there.
- [Appearances](https://antanassileika.com/all-my-appearances/): At the moment, June 2016,  I have completed the edits on my forthcoming memoir (May 2017) with ECW Press, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, and I am working hard on rewriting another novel before resuming work on The Rhyming Assassin. There is plenty to do. This August I will be speaking in Palanga, and then in […]
- [Blog Tour Image](https://antanassileika.com/blog-badge/): Consider the image below the passport for my blog tour, which has already begun. For details see above.
- [Humber Student Paper about Underground](https://antanassileika.com/humber-student-paper-about-underground/): Here’s an article from a student newspaper, the Humber Etcetera,  about Underground.
- [Interview about Underground by Eva Stachniak](https://antanassileika.com/interview-about-underground-by-eva-stachniak/): Eva is a fine writer who asked some very interesting questions. They will appear in Polish in a Toronto newspaper, and they appear now on her blog.
- [Associated Writing Programs Conference](https://antanassileika.com/associate-writing-programs-conference/): See my post about the Associated Writing Programs Conference in Washington. (This is an association of writing programs whose conference pulls in thousands of writing teachers and students – the last one in Washington in February of 2011 pulled in about six thousand. )
- [Quill and Quire Article about Creative Writing Instruction](https://antanassileika.com/quill-and-quire-article-about-creative-writing-instruction/): See my article about creative writing in this month’s Quill and Quire magazine. (Sadly, it is not available online – only in the print version, but I have put in a link to magazine web page page.) http://www.quillandquire.com/
- [Outtakes From Underground - 2](https://antanassileika.com/outtakes-from-underground-2/): In this second chapter removed from the novel, Lukas and Monika, their relationship deepening, walk further up the mountain as a storm threatens. Chapter Seventeen French Alps, August, 1948 By the following morning, Lukas’s foot, though still tender, could take some weight, so taking a stick for support, Lukas and Monika set out to go […]
- [Outtakes From Underground - 1](https://antanassileika.com/outtakes-from-underground-1/): This is one of two big chapters cut from the last version of my forthcoming novel, Underground.  In this chapter, the partisan fighter, Lukas, has become stranded in France, where he went to get help for the movement after the death of his wife, Elena.  He has fallen in love with another woman, Monika, a […]
- [Some Good Partisan links on Youtube](https://antanassileika.com/some-good-partisan-links-on-youtube/): Here are three good links among the many of varying quality one can find on YouTube. The first is a short film about an actual partisan bunker in Northern Lithuania being visited by military types in what appears to be a commemoration. The second is a trailer from the Lithuanian Film, Vienui Vieni (Utterly Alone), […]
- [Twilight of the Partisans](https://antanassileika.com/twilight-of-the-partisans/): While most of the partisan activity in Lithuania was over by 1953, remnants of the movement hid out across the country, with one hundred and forty-two still active in 1954, down to  fifty-one in 1955. One by one they were hunted down, and although individuals survived in hiding into the seventies, the last one shot […]
- [The Partisans Seize Merkine on December 15, 1945](https://antanassileika.com/the-partisans-seize-merkine-on-december-15-1945/): Sixty-five years ago, on December 15, 1945, the Lithuanian town of  Merkine was seized by a force or partisans and held for a day before being abandoned – the partisans had wanted to thumb their noses at the ruling Communists and paid for the action with the loss of five lives. The action was described […]
- [My Dinners with Joe and Wayson](https://antanassileika.com/my-dinners-with-joe-and-wayson/): Joe Kertes, Wayson Choy and I were all English teachers at Humber College in the eighties and the nineties, often teaching remedial English or ESL, and living the lives of communications teachers everywhere – which meant hundreds of papers to mark at mid-terms an end-of-terms, and then blessed relief over the summer. We were all […]
- [New revelations about the brutality of the partisan war come from a book recently published in Polish.](https://antanassileika.com/new-revelations-about-the-brutality-of-the-partisan-war-come-from-a-book-recently-published-in-polish/): (Summarized from a Lietuvos Rytas Article by Eldoradas Butrimas , November 13, 2011) “If a child is taught from the cradle to fight indiscriminately for its homeland, that child will grow up to kill anyone who is a foreigner or anyone who disagrees with him.” This is part of the confession of the late Stefan […]
- [Bloodlands Continued](https://antanassileika.com/bloodlands-continued/): “By the end of the war, half the population of Belarus had either been killed or moved.” (Snyder, 251). One of Timothy Snyder’s most important points is that the destruction of civilian populations was not limited to the holocaust (horrifying though those numbers were). Civilian death in the “Bloodlands” of Belarus, Poland, the Baltics and […]
- [More Reinterpretation of Eastern Europe in WW2](https://antanassileika.com/more-reinterpretation-of-eastern-europe-in-ww2/): Anyone with an Eastern European background, specifically Polish, Baltic, Byelorussian, or Ukrainian, can let out a sigh of relief now that Timothy Snyder’s new history of WW 2, Bloodlands, has been published. This is not to say that it lets those peoples off the hook for crimes committed on their lands. It does show how […]
- [THE “G-WORD” STILL FRAUGHT](https://antanassileika.com/the-g-word-still-fraught/): I first heard of the controversy about Lithuania’s Museum of Genocide Victims shortly after the place opened. Many people took issue with the name because it was used by a museum of the sufferings of the people under Soviet regimes but did not address the holocaust. Magazines such as Vilnius in Your Pocket mentioned this […]
- [Diabolical Equation? A Reinterpretation of Eastern Europe in WW2](https://antanassileika.com/diabolical-equation-a-reinterpretation-of-eastern-europe-in-ww2/): Historian Norman Davies, the late Tony Judt, and Timothy Snyder have been enlarging our understanding of WW 2 and Eastern Europe for the last decade or so, but now the forthcoming history by Sndyer, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, has ignited a sharp debate in The Guardian. Snyder’s article summarizing his thesis states that […]
- [The Soviet counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands](https://antanassileika.com/the-soviet-counterinsurgency-in-the-western-borderlands/): Alexander Statiev is a Canadian assistant prof at the University of Waterloo, and he’s just produced the first broad study in English of anti-Soviet partisans in the postwar period. He’s used Soviet archives, newly available, to study the methods of counterinsurgency in the long stretch of territory from Latvia in the North to Moldova in […]
- [Novel Progress - More on Narratives in Collision in Eastern Europe](https://antanassileika.com/novel-progress-more-on-narratives-in-collision-in-eastern-europe/): As I finish checking the line edit and proofing of my novel, Underground, which comes out with Thomas Allen in the spring of 2011, the subject of East European partisans continues to come up in various media. We are seeing a profound transformation of understanding about that part of the world as historians continue to […]
- [Last Notes for the Summer](https://antanassileika.com/last-notes-for-the-summer/): The summer writing workshop at Humber is occupying almost every moment of this week, and for details of what’s going on there, see my posts at the Newsroom at Humber, starting this week. On the home front, I am going through Janice’s edits slowly, but should be able to finish them pretty quickly once the […]
- [Back from Lithuania for Canada Day](https://antanassileika.com/back-from-lithuania-for-canada-day/): It’s as quiet this windy afternoon as a Sunday of my childhood, when Toronto used to close down tightly for the Sabbath. It’s all silent streets because everybody seems to have left my part of town for the countryside for the long weekend, but there’s a flutter of the odd Canadian flag; we never used […]
- [European Book Launch](https://antanassileika.com/european-book-launch/): I’ll be at the launch of the Lithuanian translation of Woman in Bronze at a conference in Lithuania in the second half of June. The event takes place in Alanta, a small town in a scenic Moletai region, a place of hills and lakes and forests. The site is a community college beside an old […]
- [What’s in a Name? ](https://antanassileika.com/whats-in-a-name/): The Genocide Museum in Vilnius is a grim memorial housed in the former KGB headquarters on Gedimino Prospektas in Vilnius.  The names of many of the people murdered inside are etched on the stones on the outside of the building, as pictured below. This museum houses brilliant and comprehensive displays of the incorporation of Lithuania […]
- [The Ghosts of Merkine](https://antanassileika.com/the-ghosts-of-merkine/): The Melancholy Town of Merkine intrigued me from the very first time I visited it back in 1989, when I arrived at dusk one winter’s night to interview a priest who had worked for the KGB. I felt as if I had stepped back in time, parked on a grassy knoll by an ancient church […]
- [Who Goes into the Woods](https://antanassileika.com/who-goes-into-the-woods/): What drives a man or woman into the Underground? Roger D Petersen, Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT, studied the motivations and social support for resistance in his 2001 book, Resistance and Rebellion. He tried to understand why, in his words, “… ordinary men and women, in the face of enormous risks, resist and […]
- [One of the Few](https://antanassileika.com/one-of-the-few/): I sat in a bunker in 2008 with one of the last surviving partisans from the South of Lithuania, Juozas Jakavonis, as he told me the story of how he missed the battle of Merkine and survived. In 1945, he found an open prayer book floating in the river near Merkine and brought it to […]
- [Victims, and Victims, and Victims](https://antanassileika.com/victims-and-victims-and-victims/): Rachel Margolis, according to writer Dovid Katz, is the most tragic survivor of the holocaust. Her crime, he writes, is surviving the holocaust in Lithuania as a partisan with the Soviets. Apparently, she is now accused of war crimes by the Lithuanian government. To read the full article, go to the link here. I don’t […]
- [Acknowledgments](https://antanassileika.com/acknowledgments/): How many people does it take to write a book? At my count, 43. Maybe the high number has something to do with writing historical fiction, because I found myself relying repeatedly on the kindness of strangers. For example, when I walked into a partisan museum in Marijampole in 2008, I found Justinas Sajauskas studying […]
- [Jewish Partisans](https://antanassileika.com/jewish-partisans/): Simon Schama, the British historian and art critic, says that the graves of many generations of soldiers and partisans can be found under the ferns in the Lithuanian woodlands. My novel deals with Lithuanian partisans in anti-Soviet resistance in the forties and fifties, but there were other partisans too, notably Jewish partisans who fought the […]
- [The Fate of Spies](https://antanassileika.com/the-fate-of-spies/): Of the nine spies smuggled into the Lithuanian Soviet Union by the British, and the eight dropped in by the Americans in the late forties and early fifties, none returned. Some were turned and became double agents, some were executed or shot in battle, and some were imprisoned. The most curious of them all was […]
- [Jonas Deksnys - A Broken Partisan](https://antanassileika.com/jonas-deksnys-a-broken-partisan/): A compelling description of Britain’s attempts to run agents in the Baltics after WW2 is told in Tom Bower’s 1989 book, The Red Web. Working with agents in Sweden, the UK sent in boat after boat of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians to land on the beach of Palanga and make their way inland to determine […]
- [Building the House of Fiction](https://antanassileika.com/building-the-house-of-fiction/): Fragments from the Writing Life – New Novel Manuscript – Version Eight This week I received my second round of edits from Janice Zawerbny, my editor at Thomas Allen, the house that is bringing out my novel, Underground, a year from now. We sat side by side at my dining room table (she lives not […]
- [Counter-intelligence circa 1923](https://antanassileika.com/counter-intelligence-circa-1923/): Jonas Budrys (AKA Jonas Polovinskas) worked for the Czarist Secret police, the Okhrana, became chief of counter-intelligence in Vladivostok for the Whites, and in 1921, took over counter-intelligence for the newly formed Lithuanian state. He is seated, second from right in the rather poor photograph above. I was restless while waiting for my next round […]
- [Murder Most Foul](https://antanassileika.com/murder-most-foul/): In 1932, my uncle strangled his lover and put her body into a drainage well, intending to dissolve it later with acid from a laboratory where he and others were hoping to make a bomb to assassinate the Lithuanian strongman president, Antanas Smetona. These are the kinds of intersections one finds when looking into the […]
- [Ponary Diary - Kazimierz Sakowicz](https://antanassileika.com/ponary-diary-kazimierz-sakowicz/): Ponary Diary is a chronicle of the relentless shooting, primarily of Jews, in pits in a forest outside Vilnius in the years 1941 – 1943 as witnessed by a Pole who lived nearby. The executioners were overseen by Germans, but the actual shooters were usually Lithuanians. Kazimierz Sakowicz was a journalist living in reduced circumstances, […]
- [The Use and Abuse of History](https://antanassileika.com/the-use-and-abuse-of-history/): The controversy about the Lithuanian postwar partisans does not end so much as undergo perpetual regeneration, with one, admittedly small, school claiming that they were simply fascist bandits who terrorized the countryside for a decade after the second world war. The standard accusations have an uncanny similarity, claiming that the two most famous partisan leaders, […]
- [The Curious Case of the Antipathy toward the Canadian Historical Novel](https://antanassileika.com/the-curious-case-of-the-antipathy-toward-the-canadian-historical-novel/): I was scanning Quill and Quire, the Canadian publishing trade magazine, when I came across an article by Russell Smith poking fun at the Canadian historical novel. He has never much liked it and he was making fun of it again in the months leading up to the publication of his new unhistorical novel. But […]
- [Tony Judt on Eastern Europe](https://antanassileika.com/tony-judt-on-eastern-europe/): Paralyzed from the neck down, English Historian Tony Judt is nevertheless writing a series of memory vignettes in The New York Review of Books. The most recent one, in the February 25 issue, includes a section about his experiences in France and Germany during the 1968 “revolutions”, which he now refers to as sadly parochial. […]
- [The Soviet Story](https://antanassileika.com/the-soviet-story/): This recent documentary film by the Latvian director, Edvins Snore makes me simultaneously pleased and uneasy. Using archival footage and commentary by experts such as Norman Davies and Vladimir Bukovsky, it draws parallels between the Soviets and the Nazis, demonstrating that their systems emulated one another and learned from one another. Snore states that the […]
- [Another Excellent Vilnius Book](https://antanassileika.com/another-excellent-vilnius-book/): The Mysterious City of Vilnius When I taught for SLS in Vilnius in the summer of 2009, I realized that hardly anyone had any idea about the city they were working in, or if they did, it was knowledge of only one of the many layers of that city. For example, Jewish Vilnius figured prominently […]
- [Paul Quarrington, Canadian Writer](https://antanassileika.com/paul-quarrington-canadian-writer/): In the other part of my life, I run the Humber School for Writers, and over on that side, I blog weekly about creative writing and sometimes about other writers. I don’t talk much about creative writing matters here, but occasionally, the two worlds do run into one another, or overlap, and let’s face it, […]
- [An Excellent Book About Vilnius](https://antanassileika.com/an-excellent-book-about-vilnius/): Here is a  review I wrote of of an exceptional book about Vilnius by the Lithuanian-Canadian geographer, Laimonas Briedis. The city of Vilnius, says geographer Laimonas Briedis, has no narrative canon, no identity in the manner of other European cities. The author seeks to remedy this problem by assembling various historical descriptions of the city […]
- [The Diary of a Partisan](https://antanassileika.com/the-diary-of-a-partisan/): This is a review I wrote for the American academic journal, Lituanus, in 2009. I’ve shortened the review slightly and made a few other revisions. The piece gives a summary of various partisan texts that I used as source material in the writing of my novel. The Diary of a Partisan Lionginas Baliukevicius A year […]
- [The Machine Gun Nest](https://antanassileika.com/the-machine-gun-nest/): I never intended to write quite so much about Lithuania as I do, but when the Soviet Union collapsed almost twenty years ago, the archives in the country opened up, and enterprising young historians began to tell about things we had never heard of before, or had only heard rumours about, or had heard about […]
- [Eureka! ](https://antanassileika.com/eureka/): This site was home made under the supervision of my son, Dainius. Let’s see if I can keep it going. I’ll be talking about my forthcoming novel, Underground, and other subjects as well, primarily to do with Eastern Europe.
- [Fall and Early Winter 2026-2027](https://antanassileika.com/fall-and-early-winter-2026-2027/):   I’ll be in Ottawa on October 1 for an embassies’ book club event. It turns out the various embassies take turns featuring authors, and the Lithuanian embassy decided to feature me for their club one evening at the Ottawa Public Library. I’ll be talking about Buying on Time Again because it is a light piece of work about immigration to Canada in the postwar era, and it’s pleasant to get a crowd laughing. Of course, my novel, The Seaside Café Metropolis came out more recently, so I’ll devote a little time to that too. Afterwards, I’ll roll down the highway […]
- [The Birth of the Seaside Café Metropolis](https://antanassileika.com/the-birth-of-the-seaside-cafe-metropolis/): This comic novel is set in a Vilnius Café in 1959, a place with no seaside, and no metropolis, but there is indeed a café. It is a place where bohemians and artists gather during the Khrushchev political thaw of the times, but there is one difference between this fashionable café and other like it around the world. The KGB is listening through microphones set in the breadbaskets at each table. My publicist described the novel as “A Gentleman in Moscow meets The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Writer Tamas Dobozy described the novel as “a culinary picaresque.” He said that because each […]
- [Spring and Summer 2026](https://antanassileika.com/spring-and-summer-2026/): Above, from left to right, winners of the Dausa family literary award presented in Vilnius on April 21, 2026: My translator,  Kristina Aurylaitė, yours truly in the category of  translated (for Nebaigti reikalai – Some Unfinished Business), Darius Žiūra in the category of first book, and  Kotryna Zylė in the category of best overall. I happened to be in Vilnius on all sorts of literary and parliamentary business. When I received the award above, I was lucky to have  five of my close relatives from Canada, including my brother Andy, along to attend the event. The whole lovely ceremony can also […]
- [Winter - Spring 2026](https://antanassileika.com/winter-spring-2026/):   The Royal York  Ballroom above I attended one big literary party early in the New Year before settling down to write again (see more about the party below). After a book our each year for the last three (and two last year if you count the reappearance of Buying on Time, now Buying on Time Again), I am in the early stages of researching a couple of new novel projects. I’ll be in Lithuania in April for business, and research, and to attend an awards ceremony, but aside from that it will be quiet work at my desk with occasional […]
- [Some  Reviews of The Seaside Café Metropolis](https://antanassileika.com/some-reviews-of-the-seaside-cafe-metropolis/): Above  – in conversation with Wodek Szemberg at the October 28, 2025 launch of  my latest novel, The Seaside Café Metropolis and below a long shot of the audience.   Here are 3 reviews of the novel: 1)   Pickle Me This About / Recently Read  / Definitely Thriving November 14, 2025 The Seaside Cafe Metropolis, by Antanas Sileika “How is it possible to live under tyranny? One must create a sort of fantasy world to shield at least part of oneself from the oppression. And under this shield, people can make alternative lives for themselves, real or imaginary ones.”  There is no seaside […]
- [Two New Books out This Fall and a Launch October 28](https://antanassileika.com/two-new-books-out-this-fall-and-a-launch-oct-28/): The Seaside Café Metropolis will be launched in October  in Toronto at the Lithuanian House at 1573  Bloor Street West. Detailed date and time to follow.  An extract of this comic novel can be read at this site. And don’t forget to look for another new publication, Buying on Time Again, a collection of humorous stories that first speared in 1997, and which has now been added to and reissued.    
- [Winter-Spring  2025](https://antanassileika.com/fall-2024-winter-2025/): 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, […]
- [Fall, 2024](https://antanassileika.com/fall-2024/):   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. I interviewed the Indigenous Canadian author, Drew Hayden Taylor at the By the Lake Book Club on the occasion of his new novel, Cold. The Estonians are doing a conference on the anniversary of the flight from the Red Army, and since The Death […]
- [A Great Profile in the Toronto Star](https://antanassileika.com/a-great-profile-in-the-toronto-star/): Toronto Star –  Wednesday, April 10, 2024 The Toronto writer who is putting Lithuania’s storied history on the literary map   Author Antanas Sileikas is photographed at Weston road and Elsmere, in the neighbourhood where he grew up, on Thursday, April 4, 2024, in Toronto, Ontario.  Giovanni Capriotti▲ Steven W. Beattie Special to the Star Published: April 10, 2024 George Galt is responsible for the latest volume of memoir from CanLit mainstay Antanas Sileika. When Galt was preparing to launch his new publishing venture, Stonehewer Books, based in Victoria, B.C., he was scouting around for writers with solid literary chops who […]
- [The Launch of The Death of Tony](https://antanassileika.com/the-launch-of-the-death-of-tony/): On March 27, A nice crowd of over a hundred guests came to hear me talk about my new book-length essay, The Death of Tony, in conversation with author Joe Kertes.  Here are a few pics from that evening, including one in which publisher George Galt holds up a copy of the book as one of the newborns from his publishing house, Stonehewer Books.          
- [Spring and Summer 2024](https://antanassileika.com/spring-and-summer-2024/): I travel to Lithuania after Snaige’s art show opens in Toronto on 6 April  at Propeller Gallery.   First, I’ll do a week with the parliamentary advisory committee.   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.
- [Launching The Death of Tony - a new memoir](https://antanassileika.com/launching-the-death-of-tony-a-new-memoir/):       Buy me here! 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.
- [Vilnius Book Fair 2024](https://antanassileika.com/vilnius-book-fair-2024/): 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 […]
- [Interview with MicroMega Edizioni on the subject of the novel Underground](https://antanassileika.com/interview-with-micromega-edizioni-on-the-subject-of-the-novel-underground/):  The interview was published in translation in Italy in December of 2023. Here are the questions and answers in the original English version:   The title of the novel, ‘Underground,’ is quite evocative, especially considering your exploration of the underground resistance of the Lithuanian partisans against the Soviet occupation. What inspired you to delve into this often overlooked part of history? For many decades, in North Americas the story of the second world war focused on  the fight against Nazi Germany on the western side of Europe, and to a certain extent North Africa. I grew up with films and television […]
- [Movie Poster](https://antanassileika.com/reviews-and-appearances/): 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:       ******************************************************************* 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 […]
- [A Visual Walk through a Few Scenes in Some Unfinished Business](https://antanassileika.com/a-visual-walk-through-a-few-scenes-in-some-unfinished-business/): The novel is set in rural and urban Lithuania in the Soviet postwar era, and as a friend said to me, “Why don’t you show some of those sites?” So here are visuals of some of the settings in the novel.   1) My young Martin, the protagonist of the novel, is a youth living in a remote village called Lynežeris in 1947, in the south of the country, not far from the Byelorussian border. It’s a poor place where people live by subsistence farming. Here is a photo of one of the finer houses, taken a few years ago.   […]
- [Remembering the Late John Bentley Mays and Launching his Posthumous Novel, The Occidental Hotel](https://antanassileika.com/remembering-the-late-john-bentley-mays-and-launching-his-posthumous-novel-the-occidental-hotel/): Postscript     My friend, the writer and critic, John Bentley Mays died four years ago, but he left behind a novel completed just before his death, and it was published recently by Guernica Editions. Here below the image of the book cover is my introduction to that novel, describing what it was like for  work through that manuscript with John, the book also has outstanding essays by Anne Collins and Richard Rhodes. And here is a four-minute video we made about John and the book and a link to a passage published in Open Book.       John Bentley […]
- [Reading Anne Applebaum in the Time of Belarusian Protest](https://antanassileika.com/reading-anne-applebaum-in-the-time-of-belarusian-protest/):   August 25, 2020   Anne Applebaum’s latest book is a study of her friends and acquaintances who turned over two decades from liberal-minded optimists to supporters of authoritarians such as Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jarolslaw Kaczynski in Poland, and one might say “aspiring” authoritarians such as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. These authoritarians project messages of anxiety with the present. They look back to a past they claim to hope to recreate. Their stories deal in nostalgia, anger, resentment and a series of other sentiments that might make them veer into anti-Semitism, anti-immigration, and anti-democracy. Meanwhile, in the population there […]
- [European Homelands of the Imagination: A Personal Account](https://antanassileika.com/european-homelands-of-the-imagination-a-personal-account/): A Talk Given for the Goethe Institut at the Thomas Mann Festival in Nida, Lithuania, July 13, 2019   Let me begin my consideration of European homelands of the imagination from afar both in geography and in time. I wish to take you to the edge of Weston, a small town in Canada in the nineteen fifties and sixties. This town is expanding into the farm fields around it, fields which have been bought but not yet developed – within these unplanted fields stand a few abandoned farm houses with broken windows, and on the ground lie ponds slick with slime; […]
- [Provisionally Yours Launched in Canada](https://antanassileika.com/provisionally-yours-launched-in-canada/):   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 Barefoot Bingo Caller Wins Book of the Year in Translation in Lithuania](https://antanassileika.com/the-barefoot-bingo-caller-wins-book-of-the-year-in-translation-in-lithuania/): 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 […]
- [Interview in the Vilnius Review](https://antanassileika.com/interview-in-the-vilnius-review/): 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.”
- [Short-Listed Again for  Book of the Year in Lithuania.](https://antanassileika.com/short-listed-again-for-book-of-the-year-in-lithuania/): The Lithuanian translation of my memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, has been short-listed for book of the year in Lithuania. 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.  
- [Fall 2018 Update](https://antanassileika.com/fall-2018-update/): Here are a few upcoming events: 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 […]
- [Vernissage Meets Book Launch](https://antanassileika.com/vernissage-meets-book-launch/): 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.    
- [Books, Books, Books - Vilnius Fair 2018](https://antanassileika.com/books-books-books-vilnius-fair-2018/): Notice the crowds – 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 […]
- [Vilnius Book Fair 2018](https://antanassileika.com/vilnius-book-fair-2018/): 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,  ž 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 […]
- [Fall 2017](https://antanassileika.com/fall-2017/): I appeared on a TV Ontario panel discussing Nick Mount’s excellent new history of Canadian  Literature of the sixties and seventies. October 21 – 5 PM – Lakeside Terrace, Harbourfront, Toronto  – Ontario Lit Up October 22 – 2 PM – Harbourfront, International Festival of Authors, with Drew Haydon Taylor October 28 – 4 PM Harbourfront, International Festival of Authors, with Kyo MacLear November 7, Toronto, Writers’ Trust Gala November 14, Assembly Hall, Toronto – interviewing John Irving      
- [Two New Books on the Baltics](https://antanassileika.com/two-new-books-on-the-baltics/): Siberian Exile – Blood, War, and Granddaughter’s Reckoning Julija Sukys – University of Nebraska Press   Toronto-born Julija Sukys is an assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Missouri. Her excellent biography of Ona Simaite, Epistolophilia, was discussed in an earlier post. Here she is out rather quickly with another affecting book of nonfiction. This one has to do with her grandmother’s years in the gulag as well as her grandfather’s complicity in The Holocaust. For much of her adult life, Sukys had wanted to write about her grandmother Ona, who was deported in the first wave of deportations […]
- [More Reviews for Barefoot Bingo](https://antanassileika.com/more-reviews-for-barefoot-bingo/): 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..
- [TVO Interview about Barefoot Bingo](https://antanassileika.com/tvo-interview-about-barefoot-bingo/):   Here is a link to a great TV interview about my latest book, the memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller.    
- [Hot Link to the Starred Quill Review](https://antanassileika.com/hot-link-to-the-starred-quill-review/): Here is the link to that starred Quill Review.
- [CBC Radio Interview with Shelagh Rogers](https://antanassileika.com/cbc-radio-interview-with-shelagh-rogers/):   Shelagh always brings out the best in me, and that is what she did in this radio interview on the subject of my memoir.
- [First Review in with a Star](https://antanassileika.com/first-review-in-with-a-star/): 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 […]
- [Book Launch Party May 2](https://antanassileika.com/book-launch-party-may-2/)
- [Giveaway of Advanced Readers' Copies (ARCs)](https://antanassileika.com/giveaway-of-advanced-readers-copies-arcs/): Here’s an opportunity for the month of February. Follow the link for a chance to win one of five ARCs.  
- [No Ambiguity](https://antanassileika.com/no-ambiguity/):     Retired General Richard Shirreff’s novel title spells it out clearly enough: War With Russia, and anyone looking for literary value should look somewhere else, but the qualities of the novel that make it compelling are Shirreff’s pedigree and an adventure story set in an all-too plausible future.   Sherriff is a retired former second in command of NATO in Europe, so the threat he is warning us about is believable given the knowledge he has. In a world filled with tragic immigration stories in the Mediterranean and war in Iraq and Syria, the Russian threat has been flying somewhat […]
- [An Interview by By Bianca Lakoseljac: Open Book Writer in Residence](https://antanassileika.com/an-interview-by-by-bianca-lakoseljac-open-book-writer-in-residence/): Here’s a link to an interview on novel writing Bianca did with me this week:          
- [Fall 2016 Appearances](https://antanassileika.com/fall-2016-appearances/): On September 25, The Word on The Street festival is being held at Harbourfront in Toronto and Kim Moritsugu and I will be hosting a day of talks by writers with new books as well as publishing industry professionals. On September 29, I’ll be running a creative writing talk and introducing new and established writers from the west end of Toronto at The Assembly Hall. The event is free. During the last week of October, The Humber School for Writers will hold a workshop inside IFOA, and on Wednesday, October 26, I will host a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the school […]
- [Tim Judah on Ukraine](https://antanassileika.com/tim-judah-on-ukraine/):   I have followed Tim Judah in the New York review of Books because he is a reporter who gets right down on the ground and speaks to ordinary people of various persuasions all across the vast geography of Ukraine. Most of the intellectuals with whom I have contact in Canada have little knowledge and less interest in central and eastern Europe, and I find it useful to read writers such as Judah, Snyder, Satter and others because they give sharp insights into this complicated and unfortunate part of the world. Ukraine remains a complicated place for westerners, who assume that […]
- [Fearful Symmetry](https://antanassileika.com/fearful-symmetry/):   How is the new Russia like the old Soviet Union? Control is centralized, as David Satter points out in his study of the country under Yeltsin and Putin, The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep.   And the title is accurate.   The book lays out how power no longer resides in the party, but rather in an interlocking system of corrupt government and oligarchs with complete penetration of the society right down to street level. Media, judiciary, police, and commerce are all under the thumb of Vladimir Putin and his cronies.   This message has been coming out […]
- [Summer 2016](https://antanassileika.com/summer-2016/): My memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, has been more or less put to bed for ECW Press. It will appear in May of 2017. The Lithuanian translation, from Versus Aureus, will appear in the spring of 2017 as well. I have rewritten my novel, Provisionally Yours, with the help of a good editor and will see his response to it at the end of the summer. This is the espionage novel inspired by the life of Jonas Budrys, the chief of Lithuanian counterintelligence from 1921-1923. His own memoir, Lietuvos Kontrazvalgyba, is an excellent and fast-paced book for those who have the  language. […]
- [The Resurrection of Buying on Time](https://antanassileika.com/the-resurrection-of-buying-on-time/):   I was pleased ands surprised to see Buying on Time, a collection of short stories I had published in 1997, make the long list for the Canada Reads competition sponsored by CBC radio.   I recently came back from Lithuania, where the translation of the book has been short-listed for the Book of the Year competition. That is a people’s choice competition in the final round, so whichever book gets the most votes will win. Anyone who would care to vote for my book is welcome to press the button “įrašyti”, which means “enter” at this link.   In the […]
- [Gravitas Versus Comedy](https://antanassileika.com/gravitas-versus-comedy/): What isn’t tragic seems funny to me, and sometimes comedy and tragedy are so closely entwined that it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. One of my earliest collections of Stories, Buying on Time, was comic and nominated for a humour award.  After that, I wrote what was essentially tragedy in Woman in Bronze and Underground. Now I am returning to comedy with a new book to be published by ECW Press in 2016 or 2017, and its working title is The Barefoot Bingo Caller. Guess what mood that might be in. As a writer on Eastern Europe and the […]
- [On Reading Timothy Snyder's Black Earth](https://antanassileika.com/on-reading-timothy-snyders-black-earth/):   Timothy Snyder‘s new book on The Holocaust is garnering some grudging reviews, but as a non-specialist on The Holocaust, I found it illuminating. One of his theses is that The Holocaust in the popular imagination is situated in Auschwitz, but he contends that that place gives an incomplete view since most of the Jews who died did so in the territory he has earlier called the “Bloodlands,”  the places where Nazi and Communist regimes overlapped. In those places, Jews were often from lower social strata and they left no memoirs – most of them took bullets and died without leaving […]
- [Fall, 2015](https://antanassileika.com/fall-2015/):   I’ve recently signed a contract for a book of stories to appear with ECW Press in the fall of 2016 or the spring of 2017. I spent the summer in Lithuania, working in KGB archives in the morning and helping to babysit my grandson some evenings. I also gave two talks at the Santara conference in Alanta, Lithuania. Here is an English translation of one of the talks I gave at the Santara conference on the subject of recent books in English with a Baltic theme. I’ll be at the Assembly Hall in Toronto with Plum Johnson in October and Lawrence Hill […]
- [Desk Versus Nature](https://antanassileika.com/desk-versus-nature/): After a long and difficult winter, spring has finally burst out in Toronto while I am overwhelmed with writing projects that keep me at my desk.   See the photo below for where I would rather be. I am rewriting the novel inspired by the memoir of Jonas Budrys, working on a collection of stories, and starting yet another novel inspired by the Rhyming Assassin of Lithuania, Kostas Kubilinskas.   The LRC has asked me to work up an essay on Eastern Europe, and I am preparing talk for a conference in Lithuania, Santara Šviesa, which I try to attend every […]
- [Imagining Lyn Lake (Lynežeris)](https://antanassileika.com/imagining-lyn-lake-lynezeris/):     Lyn Lake is far from everywhere, deep in the forest in a place with no cell phone reception and very close to the Belarus border.   Many unusual things have happened in this place, and my correspondent, Eirimas Martunass, whose father grew up here, has told me about some of them. I am drawn to this remote village because Kostas Kubilinskas, the Dr. Seuss of postwar Lithuania, taught in the elementary school while on an undercover mission to penetrate and betray the underground anti-Soviet resistance. Once he succeeded and murdered at least one man, he went on to write […]
- [Surprise Find at Vilnius Book Fair 2015](https://antanassileika.com/surprise-find-at-vilnius-book-fair-2015/): In February of 2015 I returned to the Vilnius Book Fair for the translation of my 1997 story collection, Buying On Time, translated as Pirkiniai išsimokėtinai. The conference centre was so full that people needed to be directed by security guards acting as pedestrian traffic cops. Sixty-eight thousand people attended over four days. My presentation was well attended and the books sold out, and I had many interviews, but my real surprise was stumbling across a find in the used book section. It was a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by my namesake and uncle, Antanas Sileika, in 1938. I […]
- [A New History of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact](https://antanassileika.com/a-new-history-of-the-molotov-ribbentrop-pact/): Roger Moorhouse’s new history of the Nazi-Soviet pact  begins with this sentence: On August 23, 1939, Stalin drank to Hitler’s health. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact enabled Hitler to act with a freer hand during the first two years of WW2. Westerners have been only marginally aware of this pact and the implications it had upon postwar Europe. The lands that Hitler “gave” to Stalin were the same lands he held on to after the war was over. The implications for Easterners were profound, and lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As Moorehouse says, most of his friends and […]
- [Translation at Vilnius Book Fair 2015](https://antanassileika.com/translation-at-vilnius-book-fair-2015/): I presented the Lithuanian translation of my 1997 story collection, Buying on Time, at the Vilnius Book Fair between February 21 and 23. The Lithuanian title is Pirkiniai išsimokėtinai. The collection has already been translated into Chinese and it will be translated into Italian (online) this year as well.    
- [From Chekhov to the Arabian Nights](https://antanassileika.com/from-chekhov-to-the-arabian-nights/): Two Weeks in Druskininkai, an Old-world Spa and Sanatorium While the Lithuanian spa town of Druskininkai isn’t exactly Thomas Mann’s Davos, nor Germany’s Baden Baden, it has a surreal calmness to it, with many spas dotting the pine forest. During the second week of a heatwave, visitors walk with measured gait, staying in the shade as much as possible. The place attracts vacationers from Russia and Poland, so at least three languages are heard on the streets. The architecture is a mix of old world resort, late Soviet concrete, and contemporary design, but the feel is completely retro – maybe Uncle […]
- [Writing Eastern Europe in Canada](https://antanassileika.com/writing-eastern-europe-in-canada/): In conversation with Canadian writers Eva Stachniak and Andrew Borokowski, we wondered why Canada has so few books by writers with Eastern European background. This seemed particularly odd because there are a million Canadians of Polish heritage and a similar number of those with Ukrainian background, to say nothing of Baltics and others. These musings led to a talk we gave at a Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs conference and again at a University of Toronto Slavic Studies sminar. I then wrote up my musings and published them in the online journal, The Toronto Review of Books. Here is a […]
- [A Nonfiction Book about a Village?](https://antanassileika.com/a-nonfiction-book-about-a-village/): I am rewriting the Provisionally Yours manuscript, am consulting on the translation of 1997’s Buying on Time, and have assembled  a stack of research material for my next novel, so the last thing I need is a new idea. Yet one has come at me, and I’m finding it very powerful. I received a letter from a reader in Lithuania who had some information about Kostas Kubilinskas. I used this historical character as inspiration for one of my fictional characters. Kubilinskas was the most prominent postwar children’s writer who, it turns out, had a dark secret.  In order to ingratiate himself […]
- [Publishing in Two Worlds](https://antanassileika.com/publishing-in-two-worlds/): Most of my posts have to do with history and the writing process, but I wanted to comment on appearing in translation in Lithuania, where I was keynote at a bookfair on the publication of the Lithuanian translation of my last novel, Underground., called Pogrindis in Lithuanian. If you are translated into a language you do not know, you simply accept the fact with no real  knowledge of what the reception was like. This was the case with my book translated into Chinese. But I since I have enough Lithuanian to speak it and read it, I had insight into a […]
- [The Devil in History](https://antanassileika.com/the-devil-in-history/): Communism, Facism and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century Vladimir Tismaneanu Hard on the heels of Anne Applebaum and Marci Shore, we find another reassessment of Europe in the twentieth century in Valdimir Tismaneanu’s The Devil in History, a book which is a theoretical study of the century’s two disastrous belief systems. If Applebaum looked at how the structures of civil society were destroyed in postwar Eastern Europe, and Shore looked at the personalities involved in the post-communist landscape, Tismaneanu studies the belief systems of Nazism and Communism that brought Eastern Europe to its present unsettled state. The evolution of the […]
- [The Taste of Ashes](https://antanassileika.com/the-taste-of-ashes/): The Aftermath of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe Marci Shore Marci Shore’s new analysis of Eastern Europe in the post communist era takes us into that territory through her personal journeys and the people she has known there for over twenty years. It is similar to Anna Porter’s The Ghosts of Europe (2011) but somewhat more intimate. Where Anna Porter went into Europe as an investigator, Marci Shore lived in Poland and Czechoslovakia and studied there and travelled throughout the region. Thus her analysis tells us from up close about the struggles we have read of elsewhere from a more distant perspective. […]
- [Anne Applebaums' Iron Curtain](https://antanassileika.com/anne-applebaums-iron-curtain/): The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 – 1956 Anne Applebaum Anne Applebaum was in Toronto recently to speak about her excellent new book in a Donner Lecture series. Keith Lowe, in his Savage Continent, predicted that there is far more to understand about the destruction in Eastern Europe, and now, months after that statement, we have Applebaum’s book, covering some of the same territory as Lowe and to a certain extent, that of Timothy Snyder and Tony Judt before her. The great strength of this history is the detailed description of how the communists functioned to destroy civil society in the […]
- [Lithuanian Translation Appears](https://antanassileika.com/lithuanian-translation-appears/): The Lithuanian translation of Underground, called Pogrindis, appeared in Lithuania in 2013.  Here’s a link to an article about the novel’s background (in Lithuanian) as well as an interview with Tomas Donela, who has optioned the film rights. As for the novel itself, it’s available from the publisher at the link here. For details of the book fair, see my blog post. Also her are a few more links to Lithuanian reviews and profiles: 1, 2, and a third one here. (If the last link doesn’t work, as mine is having trouble, you can find the review at Literatura ir Menas). […]
- [Keith Lowe's Savage Continent](https://antanassileika.com/keith-lowes-savage-continent/): While I am deep in source material from the 1920’s for my current novel, I couldn’t help picking up Keith Lowe’s fascinating new history that sheds more light on the postwar era in Europe. It joins the late Tony Judt, Norman Davies, and Timothy Snyder’s deep and fresh analyses of the postwar period, continuing to dispel the myth that the war ended on May 8, 1945. Lowe is particularly interested in the scale of the wreckage cause by the second world war, including the complete destruction of cites such as Warsaw, the subsequent vengeance dealt out to various parties, the wholesale […]
- [A Diplomat’s Diary – Part 2](https://antanassileika.com/a-diplomats-diary-part-2/): Fragments from the Period Lithuanian in the 1920s Robert W. Heingartner Heingartner was a diplomat sorely disappointed to be in Lithuania, and his early observations are unfailingly negative.  City hall was dirty and filled with people waiting for something. This description is applied to the opera theatre, and the banks as well. His impressions are not that different from those of people who wander into the poorer parts of Indian cities today. He complained that there is too much drinking in the town, but there hardly seemed to be anything else to do. Among the more picturesque of his observations: -chained […]
- [A Diplomat’s Diary – Part 1](https://antanassileika.com/a-diplomats-diary-part-1/): A Diplomat’s Diary – Part 1 Lithuanian in the 1920s Robert W. Heingartner If Jonas Budrys’s memoir of his directorship of counterintelligence in the 1920s forms the foreground of my next novel, the background is richly fleshed out by this quirky and insightful diary from the American consul to Kaunas from 1926-1928. Heingartner was a scrupulous diarist with an eye for detail in the new country, which he called a “provisional” country because he doubted whether it could succeed. A cultured American who had been consul in Vienna for many years, he was disappointed by the “hardship” posting in a town […]
- [Sources](https://antanassileika.com/sources/): Lenin once said that power was lying in the streets, just waiting form someone to pick it up. I have been taken to task for quoting Lenin before, but the comparison I am trying to make is just too apt. The same is true of narratives, of stories which lie around us unnoticed until someone chooses to write about them. The recent mania for the television series, Downton Abbey, led to a series of articles about its sources. Its primary one seems to have been a memoir by a kitchen maid named Margaret Powell. In 1968, she penned a memoir called […]
- [Film Option](https://antanassileika.com/film-option/): I am so pleased to have sold the option to Underground to Tomas Donela of Donelos Studija. I saw his film, Atsisveikinimas, in the European festival that played in Toronto last fall, and was particularly impressed by the cinematography. It would be great to see this project come together.   Update: May 31, 2016: The Lithuanian Ministry of Culture awarded twenty-eight thousand Euros for development, so a few years later, this project is still alive.
- [Vanished Kingdoms, by Norman Davies](https://antanassileika.com/vanished-kingdoms-by-norman-davies/): The English/Welsh historian, Norman Davies, first became widely known with his God’s Playground, a history of Poland, and then shot to wide acclaim with Europe, in 1998, perhaps the first popular history book to consider Central and Eastern Europe as very important parts of the narrative of that place. Up until then, Europe was loosely thought of as the western part, at least by westerners. What was ground-breaking in Davies was further enlarged upon by the late Tony Judt in Postwar in 2005, and more recently by the brilliant Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder in 2010. In other words, the idea of […]
- [Two New Books](https://antanassileika.com/two-new-books/): The fraught subject of the Holocaust in Lithuania is addressed and broadened by two new books from The University of Nebraska Press, a house that specializes in nonfiction and whose books are available in Canada. The first is Epistolophilia, the second biography by Montreal writer Julija Sukys. The book traces the life of an uneasy heroine, Ona Simaite (1894-1970), a Vilnius librarian who gained access to the Jewish ghetto while claiming she was going in to retrieve overdue books. On at least one occasion, she smuggled a girl out of the ghetto in a book bag. On other occasions, she brought […]
- [Thinking the Twentieth Century - Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder  ](https://antanassileika.com/thinking-the-twentieth-century-tony-judt-with-timothy-snyder/): This transcript of ruminations on the twentieth century by a pair of first-rate minds is not only a fascinating read but also a poignant document because Tony Judt was dying of ALS during the book’s composition and he was looking back on his life and ideas – it’s a kind of summing up by one brilliant and thorny historian as spurred into existence by another, younger one. Tony Judt became prominent in the public mind for Postwar, a overview of that period after WW2. He subsequently became controversial for an article about Israel in the New York Review of Books. Timothy […]
- [antanas-2009](https://antanassileika.com/antanas-2009/): [singlepic id=49 w=100 h=75 ]
- [kaunas-2011](https://antanassileika.com/kaunas-2011/): [singlepic id=42 w=100 h=75 ]
- [Writing, Reading, and Administration](https://antanassileika.com/writing-reading-and-administration/): My newest novel makes slow progress as other matters overwhelm my schedule, but each of them shares its own delights, so I’ll content myself with slow progress for the moment. The new novel’s working title is Fear no Fall, a quote from a passage in Bunyan – He that is down need fear no fall / He that is low, no pride. It’s a slightly awkward title but it helps me to keep my theme in mind. I am interested in characters who create themselves after the old order dies and the new one arises. In this case, I mean particularly […]
- [The Return of Buying on Time](https://antanassileika.com/the-return-of-buying-on-time/): I was working through galleys of one of my books last weekend, and while this is not so unusual an activity for a writer, what is unusual is that the galleys were for a book that came out in 1997. Porcupine’s Quill is doing another printing of that collection of stories, which has never ben out of print, I might add.  But the films were so old the proces had to be done again.  There is also an ebook of Buying on Time now available at the Porcupine’s Quill site. I hadn’t read this material for fifteen years and it was […]
- [Partisan Attack Part Two](https://antanassileika.com/partisan-attack-part-two/): My writing on Lithuanian postwar anti-Soviet partisans has been intended for a western audience, so I  have not gone into great detail on the subject matter, which has become increasingly controversial over the last years. For more depth about the controversy, see the blog post by Donatas Glodenis.
- [Partisan Attack](https://antanassileika.com/partisan-attack/): Just as I thought I was moving on to a new page in literary subject matter, the postwar partisan story has taken another turn with the launch of a fresh polemic against these underground resisters of Soviet occupation in Lithuania. A contentious new book has appeared in Lithuania, called A Memorial Book of the Victims of Partisan Terror (Partizanu Teroro Auku Atminimo Knyga). The book has a trilingual introduction by Povilas Masilionis in which he attacks the partisans as murderers and terrorists. Most of the book consists of a list of civilians killed by partisans. This book comes on the heels […]
- [Dramatic Biographies Part Four - Jonas Zemaitis](https://antanassileika.com/dramatic-biographies-part-four-jonas-zemaitis/): Partisan Leader Posthumously Named Lithuania’s Fourth President If the generation of Americans who fought in WW2 is considered the “The Greatest Generation” for its sense of sacrifice and courage, the same can be said out east, on the far side of Europe, where the suffering was far broader than it ever was in the west. In the west some died and others returned to the developing suburban dream, but in the east, some died, some kept on fighting, and the rest were hammered into dust for the mortar used to build the house of Communism. One of Lithuania’s most famous members […]
- [Dramatic Biographies Part Three – Kostas Kubilinskas  ](https://antanassileika.com/dramatic-biographies-part-three-kostas-kubilinskas/): The story of Kostas Kubilinskas is something like an East European joke, and by that I mean it is a particularly gruesome story with tragicomic overtones. Kostas Kulbilinskas died in 1962 and at the time he was one of the best-loved children’s writers in Lithuania. (I mentioned him in an earlier post about Lionginas Baliukevicius  – author of Diary of Partisan.) It turns out he is an excellent example of the type of writer described in Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Mind, a writer who will do anything to get published. He was a man who became a murderer in order to earn […]
- [CBC Column About Underground](https://antanassileika.com/cbc-column-about-underground/): Richard Handler of the CBC wrote this nice column about the novel and my CBC interview.
- [Among the 100 Best Books of 2011](https://antanassileika.com/among-the-100-best-books-of-2011/): It was so great to find Underground listed in the Globe and Mail as one of the 100 best books of 2011. And only three more appearances this week and then I can settle down to more serious work on the next novel.
- [Podcast Interview about Underground on Shelagh Rogers's Show](https://antanassileika.com/podcast-interview-about-underground-on-shelagh-rogerss-show/): Here’ a link to the The Next Chapter, an interview I did with Shelagh Rogers on the subject of my novel, Underground. It aired on November 14, 2011. As time goes by, the show will fall into the archive and you’ll need to scroll back to find it.
- [New Article About Underground in the Telegraph-Journal](https://antanassileika.com/new-article-about-underground-in-the-telegraph-journal/): I was delighted to see this article appearing int he Telegraph-Journal shortly before my arrival in New Brunswick.
- [All about food on my friend, Kim Moritsugu's Site](https://antanassileika.com/all-about-food-on-my-friend-kim-moritsugus-site/): I’m in Whistler and Vancouver and on the way to New Brunswick, but I am appearing elsewhere in the virtual world. Kim Moritsugu has a wonderful site about food and literature. See my entry in her latest post.
- [Doctor Juozas Markulis - Code Named Eagle - Soviet Agent and Provocateur](https://antanassileika.com/doctor-juozas-markulis-code-named-eagle-soviet-agent-and-provocateur/): Lithuanian partisans captured by the MGB in the postwar period were sometimes turned into provocateurs or double agents – few could resist the intimidation and torture used against them in interrogations. Some collaborators were more thorough and enthusiastic in their work than others. Among them were Juozas Deksnys, described in earlier posts, and Algimantas Zaskevicius (reported to have contributed to the capture of 300 partisans). But the most famous of them all was Dr. Juozas Markulis, who taught medicine at the university of Vilnius. Markulis was born in the USA but returned to Lithuania to complete studies for the priesthood. He […]
- [New Review in the Literary Review of Canada](https://antanassileika.com/new-review-in-the-literary-review-of-canada/): Anna Porter has written a thorough and informative review of Underground in the LRC. What a relief to have someone familiar with “the other Europe” doing the writing. You ccan see the review in the LRC itself or buy an online copy of the journal, but here are a couple of highlights: … In an uncompromising novel, post-war Lithuania receives its due. As for Antanas Sileika,…, he has written a tough, uncompromising book and brought those forgotten stories back to life.
- [Four Dramatic Biographies - Part One](https://antanassileika.com/four-dramatic-biographies-part-one/): While I had intended to begin this season with an entry about Robert Heingartner and the shape of my novel in progress, I stumbled across some more partisan biographies while I was in Lithuania last summer and found them too good to remain unremarked upon. The four come from a book by Rokas Subačius called (in translation) Dramatic Biographies, detailing the lives of twenty-six Lithuanians during periods of first independence and three brutal occupations. In a radio interview with Shelagh Rogers on CBC radio this fall, I said I keep going back to Lithuanian sources because the place has life stories […]
- [New Novel Progress - Last Entry for the Summer of 2011](https://antanassileika.com/new-novel-progress-last-entry-for-the-summer-of-2011/): When we think of the Versailles Peace Conference, we tend to think of President Wilson and the other big players, but among them were many smaller players as well, looking for independent nation status for former Russian provinces such as Poland, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, the Ukraine, Belarus, the Don and Kuban Cossacks as well as the Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Some would get what they wanted, but most would not. The White Russians insisted that the old Czarist Russia be recreated and all these upstart nations remain a part of the reformed empire. The great powers might have been happy with […]
- [New Novel Coming Together with the Help of Tadas Ivanauskas](https://antanassileika.com/new-novel-coming-together-with-the-help-of-tadas-ivanauskas/): With my novel, Underground, launched into the world, it is time to think of the next novel, which I have been hankering to get to. There will still be a lot of talking about Underground and the partisan war because I have media appearances and festivals to attend in the fall, but just now I can get into the research on the new novel and expand the pages of the new book that I have already written. The new novel’s working title is Fear no Fall – this is a thematic guideline for me, taken from John Bunyan, although I am […]
- [Maple Tree Literary Supplement Interview](https://antanassileika.com/maple-tree-literary-supplement-interview/): The Mapletree literary supplement is running a long interview with me about my writing and life.
- [Radio Review Link](https://antanassileika.com/radio-review-link/): I recently did a review of Anna Porter’s The Ghosts of Europe for Shelagh Rogers on CBC radio. It’s an excellent study of Central Europe and the dangers the region faces. To hear the review, go to this link at The Next Chapter and advance toward the end of the May 23 show.
- [Afghanistan Meets Lithuania In Queen’s Quarterly.](https://antanassileika.com/afghanistan-meets-lithuania-in-queens-quarterly/): The editor of Queen’s Quarterly posed a question of me at a time of great stress while my son was a soldier in Afghanistan. The editor wanted me to write about Lithuania. Afghanistan and Lithuania? What’s the link? Here’s the opening of that essay. The rest can be found in the current issue: Where I’m coming from; Where I’m Going to For the fourth year in a row I’m standing at the crossroads of Pylimo and Traku Streets in Vilnius, Lithuania, worrying the place, trying to sift the stories that lie like dust between the cobblestones. I’m slightly sick of this […]
- [New Interview at Open Book Toronto](https://antanassileika.com/new-interview-at-open-book-toronto/): You can find the interview here.
- [A Week in Canadian Literature](https://antanassileika.com/a-week-in-canadian-literature/): It’s been a busy week of literary appearances, most of them for my novel,  Underground. On Thursday, April 27, I was at the North York Public Library in front of a small crowd of twenty or so who peppered me with questions on the research for Underground as well as some of my older books. On Friday, April 29, I was reading for Diaspora Dialgoues at the Central Library. Diaspora Dialogues, run by Helen Walsh and Co, do good work bringing immigrants and immigrant writers into the Canadian literary world. One of the readers that night was Joyce Wayne, a lovely […]
- [New Review in the Edmonton Journal (and a Reprint in the Ottawa Citizen)](https://antanassileika.com/new-review-in-the-edmonton-journal-and-a-reprint-in-the-ottawa-citizen/): A a very thorough one at that And then a reprint of an earlier one in the Ottawa Citizen.
- [Harbourfront Reading](https://antanassileika.com/harbourfront-reading/): It was great to read with Johanna Skibsrud and Suzanne Desrochers at the Harbourfront Reading Series last last Wednesday. It was a packed audience of over 300 people  (the home ice advantage). Suzanne had come to the summer workshop at Humber back in 2006 ,and Johanna had once ben at SLS (Summer Literary Seminars) , with whom I worked in Lithuania a coupe of years ago. Johanna Skibsrud Suzanne Desrochers
- [Talks, Blogs, and Reviews](https://antanassileika.com/talks-blogs-and-reviews/): In the new world of book promotion, I’m finding the mass media monolith (alliteration is irresistible) of a short seven years ago when I published my last novel has devolved into a beach of promotional shards. I think I might even like this landscape better, but it certainly is different. Rather than speak to a hundred book salespeople at a mini-conference, I am going from store to store for short morning chats before the doors open. While it’s great to meet the people who might choose to hand sell my novel, I feel like I am speed-dating a hundred individuals this […]
- [New Reviews in Toronto and Montreal](https://antanassileika.com/new-reviews-in-toronto-and-montreal/): Donna Bailey Nurse reviews Underground insightfully at the Toronto Globe and Mail. The Montreal Gazette reprinted the very good review that ran last week in the Vancouver Sun.
- [Blog Tour at That Shakespearean Rag](https://antanassileika.com/blog-tour-at-that-shakespearean-rag/): Steven Beattie and I had a long conversation about the novel, historical fiction,  and my literary obsessions at his blog. That Shakespearean Rag Notes from a Literary Lad
- [A Good Review at the Vancouver Sun](https://antanassileika.com/a-good-review-at-the-vancouver-sun/): This review gives a broad, historical overview and ends with some positive remarks.
- [From Newspaper to Library to Bookstore to Newspaper](https://antanassileika.com/from-newspaper-to-library-to-bookstore-to-newspaper/): It was another busy literary week, starting with a lunch on Tuesday at a King Street restaurant called Buca, to celebrate the culling of over 2,000 story entries for the Toronto Star Short Story Contest. I won’t say much about this because the competition is still unfolding, except this – our bleary-eyed judges were glad to pass on the long list and to settle down for a lunch of “salumi”, as the various cured meats are called in this cooler than cool basement. restaurant. On Wednesday, I launched my novel, Underground, to a room of about 120 people at Ben McNally’s […]
- [The Last Word on Historical Fiction](https://antanassileika.com/the-last-word-on-historical-fiction/): The last of my essays in The National Post on the subject of historical fiction and the place of my novel, Underground, within that context.
- [The Past is Slippery](https://antanassileika.com/the-psst-is-slippery/): Here is my latest essay, on historical fiction this time, at the National Post. 
- [John le Carré territory](https://antanassileika.com/john-le-carre-territory/): My second online essay at the National Post addresses Eastern Europe as John Le Carre Territory.

## Pages

- [Photos](https://antanassileika.com/photos/):     Various Photos from Various Times.    Celebrating the new novel   Speaking at the launch of the latest novel   Explaining a point at an informal gathering   A placemat from the Writers’ Trust Gala in 2026   A menu from Vicki’s book club where she prepared all these dishes from recipes in my novel, The Seaside Café  Metropolis.   My Lithuanian editor, Saulina, standing in front of the new digs for Baltos lankos – a building whose old wooden exterior was preserved while the inside was modernized in cool concrete.   From the Toronto Star – Weston 2024 […]
- [Buying on Time Again](https://antanassileika.com/books/buying-on-time-again/): The beloved collection now updated with a new story Narrated by the middle child of an East European family who fled to a Toronto suburb after the war, Antanas Sileika’s esteemed collection could be about any Canadian family in the ’50s and ’60s — if they had an outhouse on their suburban lot and were struggling, while plotting revenge on their English-speaking neighbours. Together, these touching, hilarious stories make up a powerful chronicle of a place and time, a close-knit community, and most of all, a family: three boys, a long-suffering mother, and a strangely lovable pipe-smoking, gadget-obsessed father. First published […]
- [The Seaside Café Metropolis](https://antanassileika.com/books/the-seaside-cafe-metropolis/): “This is a rare dish served by a master chef.” TAMAS DOBOZY In this comic Cold War novel, Canadian restaurateur Emmet Argentine is trapped in Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, under the tyranny of two equally formi-dable forces: the Soviet Union, and his staunchly socialist mother. Raised in the kitchens of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, Emmet’s got a talent for hospitality that catches the attention of a high-ranking architect, who hires him to helm a magnificent new restaurant. Under Emmet’s direction, the Seaside Café Metropolis, though located neither by the sea nor in a major metropolitan area, attracts a colourful cast of bohemian […]
- [About](https://antanassileika.com/): Antanas Sileika (Antanas Šileika) is a Canadian writer, the author of seven books of fiction and two memoirs. The Seaside Café Metropolis  – novel, 2025, Cormorant Books Buying on Time Again – an updated book of linked stories, 2025, Stonehewer Books The Death of Tony – an autobiographical essay, 2024, Stonehewer Some Unfinished Business – novel, 2023, Cormorant Provisionally Yours – novel, 2019, Biblioasis The Barefoot Bingo Caller – memoir, 2017, ECW Underground – novel, 2011, Thomas Allen Woman in Bronze – novel. 2004, Penguin Canada Buying on Time – stories, 1997, Porcupine’s Quill Dinner at the End of the World […]
- [The Death of Tony](https://antanassileika.com/books/the-death-of-tony/): A delightful and evocative memoir by Leacock Medal nominee Antanas Sileika. The acclaimed novelist whose book you’re holding wasn’t always Antanas. Growing up in the immigrant hub of Weston, Ontario — with a childhood of Lithuanian summer camp, folk dancing, and booze-soaked Christmases — Sileika was known to friends and teachers as Tony. It wasn’t until he entered university that he shed the anglicized name and became Antanas Sileika, the writer who straddles two worlds. In animated, entertaining prose, Sileika recounts his time as a young writer in Paris, the dramatic events surrounding Lithuanian independence and the fall of the Soviet […]
- [Anthologies and Translations](https://antanassileika.com/anthologies/):   The Lithuanian translation of Some Unfinished Business 2024     Chinese translation of Woman in Bronze, 2023   The Italian translation of Buying on Time, 2022.           Lithuanian translation of Buying on Time Lithuanian translation of Underground Lithuanian translation of Woman in Bronze Chinese translation of Buying on Time
- [Open Book Interview: Antanas Sileika on Some Unfinished Business](https://antanassileika.com/books/some-unfinished-business/open-book-interview-antanas-sileika-on-some-unfinished-business/): Antanas Sileika on the Murderous Children’s Poet Who Inspired His Captivating New Historical Novel January 19, 2023 Antanas Sileika is one of the quiet stars of CanLit, creating memorable, complex, and enthralling stories in his five novels and his memoir. The erstwhile director of the Humber School for Writers (prior to his 2017 retirement from the College), Sileika returns in fine form this season with Some Unfinished Business (Cormorant Books). Following protagonist Martin Averka from his childhood in the tiny Lithuanian village of Lyn Lake, Some Unfinished Business is a story of idealism, coming of age, and the loss of innocence, […]
- [Some Unfinished Business](https://antanassileika.com/books/some-unfinished-business/): Is love more compelling than justice? A wife pleads for love. Her husband longs for revenge. Gripping and evocative, Some Unfinished Business tells the story of a young man who is determined to prevail through anti-Soviet resistance in occupied Lithuania, imprisonment in the Gulag, and the icy hands of bureaucracy that attempt to thwart his love for a woman with a mysterious past — all while chasing the back of the man who dared him to dream in the first place. At fourteen, Martin Averka met a teacher from the city who inspired him to seek out the wide world beyond […]
- [Provisionally Yours](https://antanassileika.com/books/provisionally-yours/): 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 […]
- [The Barefoot Bingo Caller](https://antanassileika.com/books/the-barefoot-bingo-caller/): A rollicking memoir through the shifting zeitgeist of the last five decades In The Barefoot Bingo Caller, Antanas Sileika finds what’s funny and touching in the most unlikely places, from the bingo hall to the collapsing Soviet Union. He shares stories that span his attempts to shake off his suburban, ethnic, folk-dancing childhood to his divided allegiance as a Lithuanian-Canadian father. Antanas has a keen eye for social comedy, bringing to life such memorable characters as ageing beat poets, oblivious college students, the queen of the booze cans, and an obdurate porcupine. Passing through places as varied as the prime minister’s […]
- [Underground](https://antanassileika.com/books/underground/): Buy Underground: Amazon Amazon (US customers) Chapters Indigo Barnes & Noble (US customers)   Full wraparound cover below: REVIEWED BY DONNA BAILEY NURSE From Saturday’s Globe and Mail Published Friday, Apr. 08, 2011  How are we going to survive unless we turn our hearts to stone?” a comrade warns the hero of Antanas Sileika’s Underground. The question is an example of the elegant thinking that characterizes this rare and compelling chronicle of Lithuanian partisans and their violent struggle against Soviet occupation. Sileika’s third novel follows the military career of Lukas Petronis, whose bravery and commitment to the cause elevate him to […]
- [Dinner at the End of the World](https://antanassileika.com/books/dinner-at-the-end-of-the-world/): Reviews    
- [Buying on Time](https://antanassileika.com/books/buying-on-time/): See the re-release and update of this collection, Buying on Time Again. Reviews
- [Blog](https://antanassileika.com/blog/): [catlist id=5 orderby=date numberposts=-1 excerpt=yes]
- [Woman in Bronze](https://antanassileika.com/books/woman-in-bronze/): REVIEWS Quill and Quire Antanas Sileika; $34.95 cloth 1-55022-620-7, 400 pp., 6 x 9 , Random House Canada, Aug. 2004 According to the locals, the town of Merdine is the safest place on Earth to practice adultery. After committing their sin in the ruins of a castle at the top of a hill, a couple can simply roll to the bottom and confess in the church below. Such is the last vestige of glory associated with this rainy Lithuanian Macondo imagined by Antanas Sileika in his new novel, Woman in Bronze. Sileika, the artistic director of the Humber School for Writers, […]
- [News & Events](https://antanassileika.com/news-events/): [catlist id=4 orderby=date numberposts=-1 excerpt=yes content=yes]
- [Books](https://antanassileika.com/books/):      

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