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.
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.
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 and Kristina Sabaliauskaite, but even the small halls with talks on arcane subjects were full, and every hour on the hour I had a choice of seven or more talks. I had a couple of long television interviews and couple of radio interviews. Here is a link to one with the charming and whip-smart Juta Liutkeviciute, pictured below, but you need to have the language to understand it.
The Translation of my memoir, The Barefoot Bingo Caller, has just been published in Lithuania and I will be presenting it at the February 2018 Vilnius Book Fair,
If you happen to be there and have the language, come out and see me interviewed on stage by Lithuanian television (LRT) on Friday, February 23 at 7 PM. Jolanta Kryževičiene has been interviewing me for years and she knows my work well, so I am looking forward to this talk. The interview will also run subsequently on television as will a couple of other interviews I will do both on TV and radio.
Shelagh always brings out the best in me, and that is what she did in this radio interview on the subject of my memoir.
It was a fun book launch, more like a wedding, many said, with a jazz trio and food and liquor and almost three hundred people. We sold a record number of books (213) and had a quick bingo game, won by my Humber replacement, the incoming David Bezmozgis, who tok home a mickey of Crown Royal Whiskey.
And now the first review comes in from Quill and Quire, Canada’s publishing industry journal, and it contains the much-coveted star. I have pasted in a photo that is a bit hard to read, but I’ll put in a link later if one shows up.
Here’s an opportunity for the month of February. Follow the link for a chance to win one of five ARCs.
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 WWII and postwar, I am all gravitas, as many of the posts in this blog can attest. But when I write about my childhood and life in Canada, I veer toward comedy.
Some people I know find this confusing. After killing 47 people in Underground, I needed some relief. Comedy is my refuge from the darkness of history.
And when one reads before an audience, it’s so much easier to tell when comedy succeeds. When I read from my heavier work, I’m never sure if the audience has appreciated my gravitas, or if I have inflicted some combination of mental anguish and gastric distress.
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