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From the archives

Alberta and Me

From a land of oil, true enough

Referendum? What Referendum?

A constitutional expert argues that the federal insistence on clarity has paid off

The Grey Plateau

When the world stopped five years ago

Antanas Sileika

Antanas Sileika’s 2004 novel, Woman in Bronze (Random House), was set in jazz-era Paris. His most recent novel, Underground, was released by Thomas Allen in 2011. He is the director of the Humber School for Writers.

Articles by
Antanas Sileika

Fault Lines

The vexed politics behind Ottawa’s monument to victims of communism October 2015
Not only is Canada a mosaic, but many Canadi­ans are mosaics within themselves. Given this complexity of identity, what does it mean to remember and to memorialize? Why do we commemorate some events and not others? What events should be memorialized? At a Canadian embassy office reception in Vilnius some years ago while I was on a research…

Fault Lines

The vexed politics behind Ottawa’s monument to victims of communism September 2015
Not only is Canada a mosaic, but many Canadi­ans are mosaics within themselves. Given this complexity of identity, what does it mean to remember and to memorialize? Why do we commemorate some events and not others? What events should be memorialized? At a Canadian embassy office reception in Vilnius some years ago while I was on a research…

Dark Notes in Nazi Berlin

The fate of black jazz musicians in Hitler’s Europe November 2011
At this writing, Esi Edugyan’s novel is beginning to take shape as a publishing phenomenon. It looks as if a star is being born after the book lost its original home in a failed publishing house before being picked up by Thomas Allen. The novel has gone from rags to riches. For one thing, there are not many Canadian novels that are simultaneously published in…

Book-Ending Canada's 20th Century

Profiles of two major writers help us define this place September 2009
These two slim biographies, Margaret MacMillan’s Stephen Leacock and M.G. Vassanji’s Mordecai Richler, are part of the Extraordinary Canadians series launched by John Ralston Saul, a series about notable Canadians such as Lester B. Pearson, Emily Carr, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and others. What the series is actually for is a little…

Orpheus Revisited

This eccentric experimental novel goes a little too far with the flow. September 2006