Buying on Time

by Antanas Šileika

Book Overview

The anecdotes, extended scenes and burgeoning imagination that make up these stories are tightly composed and sharply focused. The book manages to be both harsh and sympathetic. It welds humour,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0889841861
• ISBN13: 9780889841864
• Release Date: March 1997
• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

funny, engaging, humanist work

Sileika's writing about growing up in an eastern European immigrant community near Toronto offers a humorous and humanist look at family, relationships and culture. This book is worth reading because it contains many very funny sketches. When taken as a whole, this book is poignant look at fathers, brothers, mothers, and those things that keep a family in the balance between a warm cohesive, but perhaps idiosyncratic unit and a broken family where individual weaknesses have poisoned the group. Sileika's work pokes fun at North American in insightful way. I think that this book reminds me of the work of William Saryan, Mordecai Richler, and William Wharton.

Touching and Side-Splittingly Funny at the Same Time

Buying on Time is a wonderful book - I read it 2 days, barely putting it down, neglecting all else. Both an amusing read, and interesting snapshot of immigrant life in the 50's and 60's. Highly recommended!!

A well-written look back at a Canadian immigrant childhood

Antanas Sileika is an accomplished writer and journalist. In this book of linked stories, a fictional family of Lithuanian immigrants explores their new lives in the Ontario of the 1950s. I found it to be funny, thoughtful and memorable.