“We invite papers exploring recent film and television representations of the Cold War in North America and Europe that highlight the complex legacy of the conflict on both sides of the Atlantic. Particularly encouraged are papers focusing on the former Eastern bloc, in an effort to challenge the still-dominant Hollywood metanarrative.“
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.
A review of Akram Aylisli’s Farewell, Aylis
Here’s a review Olga wrote for The Common of a remarkable book that comes to us from Azerbaijan, published thanks to the advocacy of its translator, Katherine E. Young,
Contemporary books emerging from post-Soviet countries often deal with the dehumanizing effect of the region’s systems of government on its victims, seeking to trace and partially redeem the psychological and physical harm many have suffered. For understandable reasons, few authors care to look at the perpetrators, at the people who committed murders and mass murders, informed on and denounced their neighbors. Yet, in the post-Soviet reality, often it’s these people and their descendants who have risen to the top, taken charge of the new nation states, and written their laws.
It is in this context that Akram Aylisli, in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, gathers together the three novellas and closing essay that comprise his “non-traditional novel,” Farewell, Aylis. Born in 1937, Aylisli achieved fame in the Soviet Union for his earlier trilogy People and Trees. Though pieces of this new, remarkable book have appeared in Russia, the collected Farewell, Aylis, published as a result of the efforts of his American translator, Katherine E. Young, does not yet exist in any other language.
Russians in the Catskills – Tablet Magazine
Tablet Magazine has published an excerpt from Maxim D. Shrayer’s new book, A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas. The book is upcoming September, 2019 from Cherry Orchard Books (gotta love the name of the press) and is already available for preorder.
The novellas feature episodes from the life of Simon Reznikov, a young Soviet Jewish man who immigrates to the United States with his parents and studies literature in New England. How will his future turn out? He can’t see the next turn his life will take ahead of time, yet, once that turn comes, there are ways in which it has been completely predictable.
Janet Fitch’s Chimes of a Lost Cathedral
This book is a sequel to The Revolution Of Marina M about a poet who comes of age during the Russian Revolution: “The epic journey that began with The Revolution of Marina M. concludes in Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, in which passionate young poet, lover, and idealist Marina Makarova emerges as a woman in full during the transformative years of the Russian Revolution. Having undergone unimaginable hardship, she’s now at the height of her creative power and understanding, living the shared life of poetry–when the revolution finally reveals its true direction for the future.”
Published on July 2, 2019 by Little, Brown & Company
Editor: Asya Muchnick at Little, Brown
Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins Group
A review of We Are Building Capitalism! Moscow in Transition 1992-1997 by Robert Stephenson
We Are Building Capitalism! Moscow in Transition 1992-1997 by Robert Stephenson
When you’re an avid reader and a bookworm, there are times when you stumble across a book you just *know* is going to be perfect for you. I’ve had a few of those in my lifetime, and I came across one recently which couldn’t have been a better fit. My love for Russia and its literature and history is well-known; and I’ve done all manner of wittering away about iconoclasm and the like recently on the Ramblings. So when the lovely Glagoslav offered me a review copy of a new book which looked at the changes which took place in the landscape of Moscow after the end of Communism, it was a no-brainer that I’d want to read it, wasn’t it? 😀
The title of “We Are Building Capitalism!” riffs on the kind of slogans bandied about in the…
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Untitled on Russia
FSG’s Winter 2020 Catalogue includes a mysterious entry: Untitled on Russia by Camilla Bartlett. The book has an ISBN number, but no title, and a one-line description: “A revelatory history of the new Russian elite by a finance journalist with unrivaled access.” I’m intrigued.
LGBT Literature from Georgia
In this Russian-language article, Konstantin Kropotkin reviews his experiences from Frankfurt Book Fair 2018, where Georgia was a guest of honor, choosing to take up LGBT books as one of the main subjects of its program. Kropotkin bases his piece on an in-depth conversation with Georgian author, playwright and translator Davit Gabunia. His work has been translated to German, but not yet to English.
Natalya Sukhonos, “Lost in the Stars”
From The American Journal of Poetry,
An Odessan trickster-musician in a stylish blazer
and aviator sunglasses, he had a penchant for
bringing home packs of friends at odd hours of the night.
Now he blasts the Russian version of Fox News,
eats fried meat every morning,
spends countless hours online
trying to sell real estate.
Barging into my apartment <… >
Anastasia Edel’s writing for the New York Review of Books
I’ve been following Anastasia Edel’s the New York Review of Books Daily column, where she writes lyrical and thought-provoking essays about life in the USSR, often with a very contemporary hook. This week’s piece is called “My Chernobyl Vacation Friend,” tied to the recent popularity of the HBO series, and conveys the drama of how the Chernobyl survivors and people from the area were seen elsewhere in the USSR. How scared people were of each other.
Mother Winter — Sophia Shalmiyev
A Memoir, Simon & Schuster (February 12, 2019)
Agent: Jamie Carr, WME
Website: https://www.sophiashalmiyev.com/mother-winter
Cover copy:
Russian sentences begin backward,
Sophia Shalmiyev tells us on the first page of her striking, lyrical memoir, Mother Winter. To understand the end of her story we must go back to her beginning.
Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). An imbalance of power and the prevalence of antisemitism in her homeland led her father to steal Shalmiyev away, emigrating to America, abandoning her estranged mother, Elena. At age eleven, Shalmiyev found herself on a plane headed west, motherless and terrified of the new world unfolding before her.
Now a mother herself, in Mother Winter Shalmiyev recounts her emotional journeys as an immigrant, an artist, and a woman raised without her mother. Depicted in urgent vignettes that trace her flight from the Soviet Union and back again to find the mother she never knew, Shalmiyev’s story is an arresting, impassioned account that is equal parts refugee-coming-of-age tale, feminist manifesto, and a meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art. Her years of travel, searching, and forging meaningful connection with the worlds she occupies culminates in a searing observation of the human heart and psyche’s many shades across time and culture.
Punctured Lines 