Category: Events

Event Announcement: Participatory Reading for Projects in Post-Soviet Literature

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

When: Monday, November 25, 2019 at 6:30 PM – 9 PM
Where: Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, California 94110

This reading gathers together translators, writers, and scholars whose writing is connected, in various ways, with the literatures of the former Soviet Union.

We’re grateful to the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies that’s hosting its annual conference in San Francisco this year, which has allowed us to put this reading together with participants from across the United States.

A participatory reading means that, in addition to the announced readers, we’ll have a first come first served sign-up sheet for people who want to speak up and introduce their projects. We ask that each participant limits their reading or presentation to five minutes.

We’re delighted to have:
Olga Breininger with her book There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union
Shelley Fairweather-Vega with A Life At Noon by Talasbek Asemkulov
Yelena Furman with her story “Naming” from Narrative Magazine
Wayne Goodman with an excerpt of his novel-in-progress Borimir: Serving the Tsars
James Kates with Aigerim Tazhi‘s poetry collection Paper-thin Skin
Maggie Levantovskaya with her essay “To Conjure Up the Dead” from Michigan Quarterly Review
Dmitri Manin with translations of Nikolay Zabolotsky‘s Stolbtsy
Masha Rumer with her book Parenting with an Accent: An Immigrant’s Guide to Multicultural Parenting
Sasha Vasilyuk, with her novel in progress about a Soviet prisoner of war
Mary Jane White with Marina Tsvetaeva translations
Olga Zilberbourg with stories from her collection Like Water and Other Stories
Josie von Zitzewitz introducing Russophone Literature by Young Writers


and more! Please reach out to puncturedlines [at] gmail.com if you want to be a part of this.

Event Announcement: Two Olgas and One Genrikh: Russian Poems, Stories, & Shirts

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 3 Comments

When: Saturday, November 9, 2019 at 7 PM – 10 PM EST
Where: Java’s Cafe, 16 Gibbs St, Rochester, New York 14604

Join us for a lively evening of stories, poems, and performance art by nonconformist writers from the former Soviet Union, in English.

Olga Livshin‘s book A LIFE REPLACED braids together poems on immigration in America with translations from Anna Akhmatova and our contemporary Vladimir Gandelsman, winner of Russia’s highest award for poetry, the Moscow Reckoning. Many poems are responses to these two voices; some are stand-alone works. Maggie Smith comments: “Livshin, who immigrated to the US from Russia as a child, acknowledges the two Americas she knows firsthand: the one that fears and demonizes, and the one that welcomes. A LIFE REPLACED is astonishingly beautiful, intelligent, and important.”

A graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology, Olga Zilberbourg will introduce her English-language short story collection LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES. “The thread connecting these tales,” Anna Kasradze writes for The Moscow Times (ed. Michele Berdy), “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.” Olga is the author of three Russian-language books (the latest of which “Хлоп-страна,” Издательство Время, 2016). She has published fiction and essays in Alaska Quarterly Review, Scoundrel Time, Narrative Magazine, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She co-moderates the San Francisco Writers Workshop.

Opening for the two Olgas is a poetry performance by translator Dmitri Manin. Avant-garde sonnets by Genrikh Sapgir will be presented on shirts, worn by both Olgas and Dmitri. Sapgir (1928-1999), a hugely acclaimed poet in Russia, first presented his philosophical and funny Sonnets on Shirts–on actual men’s shirts–in 1975. His performance made a sensation amidst an atmosphere of official, staid, highly traditional, print-only Soviet literature. Manin revives his work and re-enacts it in English, using contemporary bodies and presences to channel Sapgir.

Java’s–a ten-minute walk or three-minute Lyft drive from the Floreano Convention Center–will have food and drink for us to regale us into the night with literature and pleasure.

NYC, October 30: Meet Jill! a bimonthly Women+ in Translation reading series

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

http://www.penandbrush.org/event/jill-reading

We love to see the growing momentum for the conversation about gender in translation. We particularly love to see how creative these initiatives have been.

A New York City group is starting up Jill!, a bimonthly Women+ in Translation reading series that spotlights women or nonbinary translators or translators of women or nonbinary authors (or both!).

The inaugural reading will take place this coming Wednesday, October 30th, at 7 pm. Location: Pen and Brush. 29 East 22nd street, New York, New York 10010.

The readers will be: Charlotte Whittle, reading work by the mid-century Argentinian avant-garde novelist and poet Norah Lange; Hilah Kohen, reading from a narrative poem by contemporary Russian author Lida Yusupova; and Larissa Kyzer, reading an excerpt from the novel A Fist or a Heart by Icelandic poet, playwright, and novelist Kristín Eiríksdóttir.

For more details and full bios, check out announcement on Pen and Brush’s website. RSVP on Facebook.