Author: Yelena Furman

Forthcoming Book Announcement: Masha Rumer, Parenting with an Accent: An Immigrant’s Guide to Multicultural Parenting

~ Yelena Furman ~ 1 Comment

From Masha Rumer comes the following announcement:

“Very excited to share that my nonfiction book, Parenting with an Accent, will be published by Beacon Press and distributed by Penguin Random House. There’s no better time for this book, which will explore the everyday stories and challenges of immigrant families as they raise kids in their adopted American home. (And yes, there will be beets.)”

Agent Katelyn Hales, Robin Straus Agency

We’re very excited too. Having read Masha’s work before, we know this will be an insightful and engagingly written book. If you haven’t read her yet, you can do so here:

What Do You Do When Your Beloved Childhood Books Scare the Crap Out of Your Kids?

My Lucky Day: The 2019 Yasnaya Polyana Longlist

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Lisa Hayden of Lizok’s Bookshelf does a round-up of the longlist nominees for Russia’s Yasnaya Polyana award. There are several women on the longlist, including Alisa Ganieva and Guzel Yakhina. Russia’s literary prizes tend to disproportionately go to male writers. We’ll have to keep an eye on the shortlist, and the final result, of course, to see if this holds true here.

http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2019/09/my-lucky-day-2019-yasnaya-polyana.html

Decolonising and demystifying Central Asian literature through translation

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Writing from Central Asia is virtually unknown to English readers. Shelley Fairweather-Vega, who translates Uzbek and Kazakh literature, is trying to change that: “I’d love to move readers away from thinking, ‘how unusual!’ to thinking ‘how beautiful!’” Read her interview here:https://globalvoices.org/2019/09/02/decolonising-and-demystifying-central-asian-literature-through-translation/

Lessons From Nabokov: Finding Freedom in a Foreign Language: Rajia Hassib on Mastering a Third Language

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Lessons From Nabokov: Finding Freedom in a Foreign Language

A Russian immigrant helped an Egyptian immigrant start writing in English. Then she found her own voice:

“To Nabokov, who probably would neither have approved of nor cared about my writing, I say this: thank you for opening this door through which I now walk.

Now, I make my own path.”

Review: Olga Zilberbourg’s “Like Water and Other Stories”

~ Yelena Furman ~ 1 Comment

“The thread connecting these tales is each protagonist’s attempt to come to terms with an identity that is always in flux, transitioning between various contexts such as emigration, motherhood, partnership, and employment. For this reason, bicultural readers of varied backgrounds will likely hear their own experiences resonating with this collection.”

Anna Kasradze reviews Olga Zilberbourg’s debut collection in The Moscow Times:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/08/24/olga-zilberbourgs-like-water-and-other-stories-a66997

The Cheburashka Collective: New poetry of the post-Soviet diaspora

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“The Cheburashka Collective is a group of women and non-binary writers whose identity has been shaped by immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States. On April 27, 2019, six members of the group, which is named for a beloved Soviet cartoon character, gathered in Philadelphia’s Penn Book Center for a poetry reading. Meduza in English news editor Hilah Kohen sat down with five of those poets before the event. They discussed what shared immigrant experiences can do for collectives, what collectivity can do for poetry, and what poetry can do for our world today. The “Cheburashki” also shared seven of their recent poems, which are reprinted below this interview with the kind permission of their publishers.”

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2019/04/29/the-cheburashka-collective-new-poetry-of-the-post-soviet-diaspora

Olga Livshin’s A Life Replaced

~ Yelena Furman ~ 2 Comments

Thursday, July 18, 2019

Olga Livshin’s A Life Replaced

The poet and translator Olga Livshin has published a new book, A Life Replaced, that includes both her original writing, and new translations of the work of the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, as well as writing by a more recent poet, Vladimir Gandelsman. 

What makes this collection unique is that Livshin, who spent her childhood in the former Soviet Union and has since lived in the United States, engages energetically and creatively with the two poets she translates and with the countries she has lived in, asking thought-provoking questions about a range of topics.

http://zackrogow.blogspot.com/