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.

Voices for Ukraine: A Words Together Worlds Apart Reading

February 28, 2022March 2, 2022 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Many of us have been wondering how to help Ukrainians who are under a renewed attack from Russia. Poets Olga Livshin and Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach have put together a reading by poets from Ukraine writing in Ukrainian and Russian, and translated to English. Read the event description below and register for the event happening March 1 at 12:30pm ET. This message includes links to organizations where you can make donations to support Ukraine in this time of war.

*Words Together Worlds Apart spearheaded by poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach is a virtual reading series. Its mission is: “To maintain & build literary community across distance through our shared love of words. Featured readers will share their work around a weekly theme, followed by interactive discussion.”

From Olga and Julia:

Amid the current catastrophe in Ukraine, a brutal invasion of a sovereign nation, it is more urgent than ever to listen to the voices of its people. While media provides overwhelming coverage, literature, poetry, and art are just as important for processing, coping, and surviving trauma.

Hosts Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach and Olga Livshin unite Ukrainian poets and their translators alongside US poet-allies in Voices for Ukraine–a transatlantic reading spanning from Kyiv, Odesa, and Lviv, to LA, Atlanta, Philly, and Little Rock, as well as recordings Ukrainian poets have sent in the event they are unable to join us live due to internet outages and air raids.

***Please note that you need to register on Zoom. Another way to register is through event page on Facebook.

Readers include:

Ilya Kaminsky
Katie Farris
Carolyn Forché
Boris Khersonsky *
Lyudmyla Khersonska *
Lyuba Yakimchuk *
Iya Kiva *
Oksana Lutsyshyna

Oksana Maksymchuk *
Dzvinia Orlowsky
Vitaly Chernetsky
Yuliya Chernyshova *
Danyil Zadorozhnyi *
Ostap Slyvynsky *
Katherine E Young

Boris Dralyuk
Olena Jennings
Amelia Mukamel Glaser
Yuliya Ilchuk
Hilah Kohen
Joy David
Victoria Juharyan

We need their voices and they need our support and collective action. Our solidarity! (*indicates poets speaking from Ukraine).

There is a suggested $5 donation to support the reading series, which can be paid via Venmo @ Julia-Dasbach or PayPal: jkolch@gmail.com. Contributions are always welcome but never required, anything you give, big or small, helps. 90% of all the funds collected today go towards https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/unicef-children-are-bearing-brunt-intensifying-crisis-ukraine/39481 getting humanitarian aid to the children in Ukraine. For more reputable organizations you can donate to, see the following list: https://helpukrainewin.org/?ref=producthunt&fbclid=IwAR0z0tCZO_rqfVKHThRbwptC3VaSwVC9aHrXxFvTwsn550f7jjxk-UYtOMU

Even through this unbearable ache, let’s try to find solace in each other’s words together, as we stay worlds apart.

Going to AWP22? Panels not to miss!

February 25, 2022March 1, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 3 Comments

Annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs is coming up March 23-26, and will be held in Philadelphia as well as online. The conference will include a number of events featuring writers that we follow, writers with a connection to the former Soviet Union and diaspora spaces. Take a look at our list, and please note that some of these will be in-person, while others are virtual.

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Triple Axel by Yelena Furman, The Willesden Herald’s Story of the Month

February 22, 2022February 9, 2022 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

Whether or not you watched figure skating at the Olympics this year, or are closely related to somebody suffering from arrhythmia, if you have read Aleksander Pushkin’s The Belkin Tales, this recently published story by our co-founder Yelena Furman is for you. And if you haven’t read Pushkin’s stories yet, you might want to read them, too!

Congratulations Yelena with your new fiction publication!

Revealing Poetry from Within: An Interview with Alla Gorbunova, by Alexandra Tkacheva

February 9, 2022March 1, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Alla Gorbunova is a Russian poet, prose writer, translator, and critic. She has published six books of poetry and four books of prose, and her work regularly appears in major literary journals, including Znamia, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Vozdukh, TextOnly, and others. Gorbunova’s poems and prose have been translated into many languages. She has taken part in Russian and international festivals of poetry and prose, and in 2012 participated in poetry readings in New York and Chicago. English-language translations of her poems and prose have appeared in Poetry, Words Without Borders, Columbia Journal, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, and Nashville Review.

The English translation of her book of prose It’s the End of the World, My Love by Elina Alter is forthcoming from Deep Vellum Press in 2022. Gorbunova is a laureate of Russia’s most prestigious literary awards, including the Andrei Bely Prize, the NOS Literary Prize, and the Debut Prize. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy at St. Petersburg State University.

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Yelena Furman reviews the new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevkaya

February 3, 2022February 3, 2022 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 3 Comments

In the fall of 2021, Deep Vellum Press brought out a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s stories, her collection The New Adventures of Helen, in translation by Jane Bugaeva. Our own Yelena Furman reviewed this translation for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

This collection gathers Petrushevskaya’s fairy tales for adults, published under one cover in Russian in 1997; some other selections from that Russian volume have previously appeared in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. To be sure, there are still plenty of human vices in these pages. But instead of a world in which degradation reigns supreme, here goodness prevails, aided by a large dose of magic.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-realm-of-forgotten-things-on-ludmilla-petrushevskayas-the-new-adventures-of-helen/

Read the full review at LARB, and buy the book–the best way to support an innovative publisher!

We love and admire Petrushevskaya’s writing and would love to have more responses to her work on our blog. Feel free to pitch us your reviews, and formal or creative essay ideas at puncturedlines [at] gmail.com.

Virtual Conference on Radiant Maternity in Literature and Culture

January 14, 2022January 16, 2022 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

As readers, feminists, and ourselves parents, we at Punctured Lines are happy to learn that Drs. Muireann Maguire and Eglė Kačkutė are organizing a two-day conference to launch the Slavic and East European Maternal Studies Network. The conference is to take place on January 28 and 29, 2022, and the stellar list of presenters and topics includes our contributor Natalya Sukhonos’s paper on Motherhood, Math, and Posthumous Creativity in Lara Vapnyar’s Russian-American novel Divide Me by Zero. We ran a Q&A with Lara Vapnyar shortly upon the publication of that novel.

Our contributor Svetlana Satchkova will participate in an online discussion on Motherhood, Gender, Translation and Censorship in Eastern European Women’s Writing, and scholar and translator Muireann Maguire will present a paper on Breastfeeding and Female Agency in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel.

The full listing of events is available on the conference’s website. To register, please email SEEMSmaternal @ exeter.ac.uk by January 21st, 2022. The sessions will be conducted in English.

Born in the USSR, Raised in California: Video Recording

December 8, 2021March 1, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 11 Comments

Thanks to everyone who could attend our event on Saturday, December 4th, and thank you all for your engagement and for your wonderful questions. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s the video recording from the event and links to our work.

Seven immigrant writers read their fiction and nonfiction related to immigration, identity, family history and the mother tongue(s). Let’s talk about buckwheat and pickled herring with beets. What do you do if your children refuse to eat traditional foods? Or when your dying grandmother forgets English and Russian and begins speaking to you in Yiddish? Does a Soviet-era secret still matter when the country no longer exists? We explore love, life, loss and the nuances of living with a hybrid identity.

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Born in the USSR, Raised in California: Immigrant Writers Read From Their Work

November 22, 2021March 1, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Dear Punctured Lines readers — come meet us on Zoom, and help us celebrate the publication of Masha Rumer’s book! (In San Francisco? Come meet us in person, details below.) We’re so happy to welcome Masha’s newly published Parenting With an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children (Beacon Press). Punctured Lines published a Q&A with Masha when this book was still in the proposal stage, and we’ve been following Masha’s Twitter posts about its development with great interest and anticipation. Now that this book is out and available for all to read we are ready to party (and encourage all of our readers to buy it)!

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Cultivating the Habit of Looking: A Q&A with Julia Zarankin

November 3, 2021March 1, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Julia Zarankin is the author of a memoir Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder (Douglas & McIntyre, 2020) that was warmly welcomed by both the birding and the literary communities. She was born in the Soviet Union and as a child immigrated to Canada with her family as part of the Jewish refugee movement. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and taught in the US before returning to Canada. She lives in Toronto and publishes essays and short fiction in English-language magazines both in Canada and in the United States.

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Crowded Lives and Crowded Stories: Alina Adams and Maria Kuznetsova Discuss their Recent Novels

October 13, 2021March 1, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

We are delighted to present a conversation between Alina Adams and Maria Kuznetsova, whose recent critically acclaimed novels make significant contributions to the body of Russian-American literature. Both Adams and Kuznetsova were born in the USSR and immigrated to the US with their families as children, though some years apart. In their novels, the authors turn to USSR’s history to tell their stories. Adams is a professional writer on topics from figure skating to parenthood and a New York Times bestselling author of soap-opera tie-ins. In The Nesting Dolls (Harper, 2020), she focuses on three generations of Soviet-Jewish women in a story that moves from Odessa to Siberian exile to the Brighton Beach immigrant community. Kuznetsova is a writer, an academic, and a literary editor. In her second novel, Something Unbelievable (Random House, 2021), she alternates between the perspectives of a grandmother and a granddaughter: between the story of a WWII-era escape from the Nazis taking over Kiev and the experiences of a contemporary New Yorker adjusting to new motherhood.