As a response to our first publicity efforts for this blog, Yelena and I received a tweet from Jennifer Eremeeva, an expat who moved from the US to Russia. In 2014, she published a book of short stories about her protagonist, also named Jennifer, who was a Russia super-fan in the 1980s, started learning the language and traveling around the Soviet Union on the eve of its dissolution–then met a man she fell in love with, and married him, and ended up staying for twenty years.
I’ve just started reading this book on Amazon, and this seems a page-turner. Jennifer is a keen observer and a natural storyteller, with a sharp sense of humor and attention to the nuance of language and culture. And she’s got so many interesting stories to tell!
Author: Jennifer Eremeeva
Title: Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow
Publisher: Small Batch Books
Pub date: February 3, 2014
Published by Olga Zilberbourg
Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also dives into topics of bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Anthony Marra called it “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope,” and Karen Bender said, “Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.”
Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California. She has published four collections of stories in Russia, including most recent Задержи дыхание [Hold Your Breath] from Vremya Press. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.
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