Author: 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.

Interview with Sophia Shalmiyev

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Sophia Shalmiyev’s (Mother Winter) interview with Katie Collins Guinn in Nailed magazine is remarkable for the way it allows Shalmiyev’s voice to come through. There’s a sense of true intimacy between the interviewer and interviewee that allows us to dive deeply into Shalmiyev’s writing, and her relationship with art and family.

https://nailedmagazine.com/interview/interview-sophia-shalmiyev/?fbclid=IwAR1_sgQTU9vM5GGtlXjChEwPoMosghcxSX6G4GqjMVpqXyTEes_Q59sY1Zk

A fantastic read, this piece also offers us photographs of Shalmiyev’s art.

I have only wanted for women and girls to pick up the book and find other women to follow and emulate and try on and discover and research and then pass the torch. That was part of the goal. There are codes and messages in a bottle and secret passageways but nothing that’s sacred or hidden in a sadistic way. So much of the cannon is about saying that some piling on of allusions is sophisticated and enlightened and a test of whether you are in the club. I read a bunch of the club. I don’t hate it. Ezra Pound is problematic on so many levels but I did get what I needed from him. He is not my people. And so I wished to do something in the same vein but for my own tribe. Sappho is my mother. She is a legend because a stitching is performed around her words and persona every day. It’s a parallel process for me.

https://nailedmagazine.com/interview/interview-sophia-shalmiyev/

An early reader’s review of Hamid Ismailov’s Of Strangers and Bees in Shelley Fairweather-Vega’s translation

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David Chaffetz writes for Asian Review of Books:

“One could characterize the overall effect as Master and Margarita comes to the Uzbek Cultural Center of Queens, NY. The poet’s profusion of words underscores his passion for his experience as a child growing up in the fields of Transoxiana, the insouciance of being a state-sponsored intellectual, the desperation of being a stateless person in rigidly bourgeois Europe.”

Upcoming Book: Cold War Casual

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Anna Krushelnitskaya’s book, Cold War Casual/Простая холодная война is a bilingual work that collects oral testimony and interviews about the ways the events of the Cold War and the government propaganda affected people in the US and in the USSR. This seems of tremendous interest to all of us who have lived through that epoch and/or write about it.

Krushelnitskaya has translated the testimony and interviews so that each piece is available in both Russian and English. The announcement reads: “The interviews were conducted in the native languages of the respondents in a casual, friendly format to record the subjective evaluations of the Cold War period in an attempt to establish whether, and how, the lived experiences and memories of the respondents influenced their sense of national pride, instilled a fear of war or the enemy, invited cultural openness or isolation and participated in forming personal long-term ideological stances.”

This books is available for pre-order.

Pub date: October 22, 2019

Publisher: Front Edge Publishing, LLC

Upcoming Book: Lara Vapnyar’s Divide Me by Zero

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I’m thrilled to report that Tin House is publishing Lara Vapnyar’s new novel. It’s available on pre-order, and I recommend that you pre-order it now to make sure to reserve your copy!

As a reformed math school student (Leningrad, 239 shkola), I can never get enough of math stories in fiction. The publisher’s description makes this book sound delicious:

As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Half-mad with grief, Katya turns to the unfinished notes for her mother’s last textbook, hoping to find guidance in mathematical concepts.

With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United States. She is, by turns, an adrift newlywed, an ESL teacher in an office occupied by witches and mediums, a restless wife, an accomplished writer, a flailing mother of two, a grieving daughter, and, all the while, a woman in love haunted by a question: how to parse the wild, unfathomable passion she feels through the cool logic of mathematics?

Matter | A (somewhat) monthly journal of political poetry and commentary

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Guest-edited by Larissa Shmailo and Philip Nikolaev, Issue 26 is dedicated to political poetry and prose in translation from Russian and written originally in English by writers with Russian affiliations.

In the spirit of 2019, at least two poets (Anna Halberstadt and Katia Kapovich) write about Stalin: “O motherland. O motherfuckerland,” sighs-screams Kapovich.

Olga Livshin and Polina Barskova (translated by Philip Nikolaev) are in conversation with Akhmatova.

Katherine E. Young translates Inna Kabysh:

O, Moscow, Tatar sack of gold:
obedient and cunning,
boyar’s beard, son-of-a-bitch,
matchmaker, drunk in the morning …

More treasures here:

Issue 32, May 2023

Sinead Morrissey’s Soviet Poems

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September 2019 issue of AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle includes Chapman Hood Frazier’s interview with poet Sinead Morrissey, a highly decorated poet hailing from Northern Ireland. Her collection Parallax (which won the T.S. Eliot Prize) includes a poem titled “Shostakovich” in a group of a few others that directly reference the Soviet Union.

In the interview, Morrissey explains that her parents were members of the Communist Party. “Growing up in a Communist household and having, as a consequence, a rosier view of the Soviet Union and the Communist project than neraly everyone else around me, gave me a particular world-view which came under strain as an adult, when I began to read Russian history and to understand some of the atrocities which had taken place. This is one of the most important instances of parallax in my own life, and one which Parallax as a body of work is also most exercised with. The Soviet poems are kinds of punctuation marks throughout the book, and all of them are different. In the end I think the subject itself is unknowable–what we see is always so determined by where we stand–and it is the fraught act of perception itself which interests me most of all.”

The interview is in the print issue of the magazine and is available online with subscription.

Upcoming Book Announcement: Alex Halberstadt’s Young Heroes of the Soviet Union

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From the publisher: “In Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, Russian-American author and journalist Alex Halberstadt sets out on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of familial trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that afflicts his family. This journey leads him to track down his grandfather–one of the last living bodyguards of Joseph Stalin–and to examine the ways in which The Great Terror and decades of Soviet totalitarianism indelibly shaped three generations of his family. He goes back to Lithuania, where his Jewish mother’s family was from, to revisit the trauma of the Holocaust and a pernicious legacy of anti-Semitism that has yet to be reckoned with. And he explores his own story, as a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America–to a housing project in Queens–as a twelve-year-old boy and struggled with feelings of rootlessness, identity, and yearning for home.”

Publisher: Random House

Agent: The Wylie Agency

Pub date: March 10, 2020

Blog Round-up: Books First Published Summer 2019

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Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth, May 14, 2019

Olga Livshin, A Life Replaced, June 25, 2019

Janet Fitch, Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, July 2, 2019

Margarita Khemlin, translated by Lisa C. Hayden, Klotsvog, August 27, 2019

Sergey Tretiakov, translated by Robert Leach and Stephen Holland, I Want a Baby, September 2, 2019

Lara Prescott, The Secrets We Kept, September 3, 2019

Olga Zilberbourg, Like Water and Other Stories, September 5, 2019

Maxim Shrayer, A Russian Immigrant, September 17, 2019