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A Discussion with Antanas Sileika and Tamas Dobozy

in partnership with Words Worth Books

Adults

Join authors Antanas Sileika and Tamas Dobozy as they discuss their new books, Death of Tony (Sileika) and Stasio: A Novel in Three Parts (Dobozy).

About the Authors:

The former director of The Humber School for Writers, novelist Antanas Sileika is the author of eight books including this memoir. He has been short-listed for the Leacock Medal for Humour and the City of Toronto Award, been serialized on CBC's Between the Covers, and a feature film adapted from his novel, Provisionally Yours.

Tamas Dobozy lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, and has published four books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, Siege 13: Stories (which won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Governor General's Award: Fiction, and the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), and most recently, Ghost Geographies: Fictions. Tamas has published over seventy short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, won an O Henry Prize in 2011, and the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards in 2014.

About Death of Tony:

A delightful and evocative memoir by Leacock Medal nominee Antanas Sileika.

The acclaimed novelist who wrote this book 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 and began to understand his deep attachment to his heritage 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 Union, and his growing involvement in Lithuania's political and cultural spheres. Proud of his heritage but unafraid to explore its darker chapters, he touches in this book on the Holocaust and the gulag, as well as the new threats facing Eastern Europe today. Laced with humour and wry observations, The Death of Tony is a tribute to the immigrant experience, a primer for Canadian readers on the history and culture of an underrepresented nation, and above all a sensitive exploration of this author's bifurcated identity.

About Stasio - A Novel in Three Parts:

This detective novel - presented in three distinct novellas - traces the ever deepening involvement of the protagonist Anthony de Stasio in a series of political nightmares, from a cursed firearm in "Steyr Mannlicher" that leads him through the world of a single mother's hardscrabble poverty; to the tormented life of a daughter imprisoned in a world her father built for her in "Photo Array"; to the workings of a mysterious postwar utopian cult that traffics street kids in an attempt to engineer a universal refusal of the vote in "The Unaffiliated." Each novella deepens Stasio's immersion in the charnel house of contemporary politics, and features a supporting cast of characters whose personal involvement attempts to rescue him from it.

Presented in partnership with Words Worth Books in celebration of 40 years.

Programmer:  Nancy

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