Stonehewer Books

Fall 2024 – Winter 2025

~ Antanas Sileika

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.

As well, I continue to work with a few students from The Humber School for Writers,..

Fall, 2024

~ Antanas Sileika
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.

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 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.

I teach a masterclass in fiction at the Toronto International Festival of Authors, attend the Writers’ Trust Storytellers’ Ball as a guest author in November, and also speak about writing with the Writing Community of York Region.

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: