Category: Fiction

A Reading Recommendation: Nino Haratischvili’s The Eighth Life

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

This reading recommendation comes to us via Jennifer Eremeeva’s Twitter feed. (Thank you the amazing Russian literary twitter!) Nino Haratischvili was born in Georgia in 1983 (according to Wikipedia), and lives and writes in German. She has been publishing fiction and drama since approx. 2001, and her novel The Eighth Life (for Brilka) was recently translated to English by Charlotte Collins and published by Scribe–Australia and UK based publisher.

Brief description from the publisher: “At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian Empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste …”

Note: In German, Nino’s last name is spelled “Haratischwili,” but in the English publication, it’s “v” instead of “w”: Haratischvili.

Publisher: Scribe

Pub date: October 1, 2019

English PEN Translates Awards 2019

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Punctured Lines congratulates Lisa Hayden, whose profile we featured on the blog previously, for being among the winners of the English PEN Translates award for her translation ofThree Apples Fell from the Sky by Narine Abgaryan from Armenia (the novel is written in Russian). The translation is forthcoming from Oneworld in May 2020.

“‘English PEN has long argued for the broadest possible internationalism in our publishing world, not as a niche interest or a luxury, but as a cultural necessity,’ Daniel Hahn, Chair of the PEN Translates Selection Panel, said. ‘With each round, this our fifteenth, PEN Translates receives an ever-greater number of more competitive, more promising, more diverse submissions, from terrific publishers of all sizes who, even in a risk-averse business, continue to look out at the world with ambition.'”

The complete list of the winners, including for translations from Georgia and Bulgaria, is here: http://georgiatoday.ge/news/18853/One-of-20-PEN-Translates-Awards-Goes-to-a-Title-Translated-from-Georgian

Looking Back on Our First Event: Participatory Reading in Post-Soviet Literatures, in Pictures

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 3 Comments

On November 25th, Punctured Lines hosted our first literary event in San Francisco. Thanks to a conference that brought to San Francisco scholars, translators, and writers in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, we were able to gather a star list of participants. A few of the readers have appeared in Punctured Lines, and we certainly hope to feature more of their work. Following the scheduled portion of the event, we hosted an open mic that turned out to be a great crowd-pleaser. Below are the pictures we captured that night and brief descriptions of everyone’s contributions.

Shelley Fairthweather-Vega opened with an excerpt from her recently published translation of Talasbek Asemkulov’s novel A Life at Noon — available for purchase here. A story about a musician growing up in Soviet Kazakhastan and learning his art form from his father.

Yelena Furman read the opening from her short story “Naming,” recently published in Narrative Magazine, and available in full online (free, with free registration required).

Wayne Goodman read a few brief excerpts from his historical novel Borimir: Serving the Tsars that re-imagines gay romance in Imperial Russia. There’s lots of awkward flirting! This book is available for purchase on Amazon.

Maggie Levantovskaya read from her essay about a trip to Auschwitz concentration camp “To Conjure Up the Dead,” published in Michigan Quarterly Review. The bizarreness of Holocaust tourism with the post-Soviet twist. An excerpt from this essay appears online.

Dmitri Manin wore the T-shirt with Genrikh Sapgir’s poem on the back, and read to us his translations from Sapgir’s “Poems on Shirts” book. We have published three of these translations in an earlier post.

Masha Rumer shared an essay about exposing an unsuspecting date to the delights of pickled herring-and-boiled beet salad, aka “Seledka pod shuboj.” He lived long enough to propose. We’re hoping to read the follow up on this story in her upcoming book, Parenting with an Accent: An Immigrant’s Guide to Multicultural Parenting. More about Masha and her book in the Q&A she gave Punctured Lines.

Sasha Vasilyuk followed with an excerpt from her novel-in-progress about a Soviet prisoner of war. We will be following the development of this project closely.

Mary Jane White delighted us with her translations from Marina Tsvetaeva — her delivery of the “Ode to the Rich” landed particularly well with our audience. Mary Jane’s book of her own poetry and translations from Tsvetaeva Starry Sky to Starry Sky is available online. We will be following up with news of her upcoming book of translations from Tsvetaeva’s Berlin and Prague years, Poems of an Emigrant: After Russia, Poem of the Hill, Poem of the End, and New Year’s.

I read the opening of “Rubicon,” a short story from my collection Like Water and Other Stories.

Josie von Zitzewitz followed up on the thread of discussion about the lack of visibility of contemporary Russian literature in the United States, and introduced a project that she’s developing with Marian Schwartz and Hilah Cohen, soliciting work from young Russophone writers to create a feature publication in an American magazine (possibly more than one).

Joining us for the open mic portion of the show, we had Maxim Matusevich, a writer and a historian of USSR intersections with African countries. He delivered an excerpt from his hilarious short story about cultural encounters between American students going to study abroad in St. Petersburg.

Christopher Fort closed the evening with a poem that he read in both Uzbek and English, bringing our attention to a particular rhyming pattern of Turkic languages. We have previously linked to Christopher’s interview about translating Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon novel Night and Day. This novel is now available for purchase online.



Overdue Praise for Karolina Pavlova’s Work

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

Karolina Pavolva was born in 1807 in Yaroslavl, Russian Empire, and published her novel A Double Life in 1848. This year, 171 years after the original publication, Columbia University Press gave this book a new life by releasing Barbara Heldt’s translation in their stellar Russian Library series.

The publisher calls the book “an unsung classic,” and I’m so pleased to see that this book is receiving the attention it deserves. In November, Talia Zax wrote a wonderful review of it for The Atlantic:

The slim mixed-genre novel . . . follows the 18-year-old Cecily von Lindenborn as her mother attempts to find her a husband. Cecily’s days, written in prose, are filled with the pleasures of a rotely feminine aristocratic life: romance, balls, and new dresses. But at night, her dreams are narrated in poetry, sensual verses with an intense pull toward the natural world. Pavlova constructed a strikingly prescient psychological vision: a mind responding to extreme social pressure by slowly and completely separating itself into parts, but giving few external indications of change.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/11/karolina-pavlova-double-life-translated-barbara-heldt-review/601342/

Pavlova had a long and underappreciated career in Russia as a poet, and I’m very pleased to share a recent translation of her poem “Moscow” by Katherine E. Young. (Scroll down to the third entry.)

Podcast: Olga Zilberbourg in Conversation with Jennifer Eremeeva

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Olga Zilberbourg spoke with Jennifer Eremeeva about Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press) in a podcast for The New Books Network. It’s a fantastic interview, including about cultural misunderstandings, which starts with Olga reading the inventive and touching “Dandelion” from her collection. Listen to the conversation and follow Jennifer on Twitter @JWEremeeva – we do!

“A new generation of Russian emigres is blessed — or cursed — with the ease of long-haul flights and frequent flyer miles, Skype and FaceTime, Google translate, and regulations that seem anyway to be more forgiving about former citizens traveling to and fro. For them, the border has become far more porous than it ever was, and the choices are now more nuanced. However, there are still plenty of cultural minefields to navigate. To this generation that includes writers as disparate as Gary Shteyngart and Irina Reyn comes Olga Zilberbourg with a new collection of short stories, ‘Like Water and Other Stories.'”

https://jennifereremeeva.com/like-water/

Interview with Olga Zilberbourg by Odette Heideman

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

A Q&A with Olga Zilberbourg in Epiphany Magazine about LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press):

“As a writer, when I’m structuring a collection of stories, I make an assumption that, like me, my readers are interested in the human being who shows up most fully in the white spaces between one’s story ending and another’s beginning. From the information on the cover alone, my reader knows that I’m a woman, that I grew up in the Soviet Union, and that I live in the US and I write in English. So, yes, nearly automatically, my story is framed as an immigrant’s story. Then comes the interesting part.”

http://epiphanyzine.com/features/2019/11/27/short-form-olga-zilberbourg  

Image result for like water and other stories images

Alicia J. Rouverol on Olga Zilberbourg’s Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press, 2019)

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

A recent review singing the richly deserved praises of our own Olga Zilberbourg’s debut English-language collection, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, out now:

“In an era of ‘short shorts’ hailed in by the venerable Lydia Davis—and culminating in ‘the fragmentary’ in the recent Nobel Prize-winning work of Olga Tokarczuk—one wonders if there remains space for a new collection of shorts: stories that up-end expectation and offer distinctive voice and lesser charted areas of exploration. San Francisco-based, Russian émigré writer Olga Zilberbourg, in her first story collection published in English, allays that concern. Zilberbourg is author of three Russian-language story collections; her fiction has been widely published in esteemed US literary journals; and she has won numerous prizes, including the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize in 2016. A native of Leningrad, raised in St Petersburg, Zilberbourg moved to the US in 2006 to study at the Rochester Institute of Technology, later earning the MA in Comparative Literature at San Francisco State University.”

http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/?p=11103

Yelena Furman’s short story “Naming” published in Narrative Magazine

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

We congratulate our own Yelena Furman on her first ever fiction publication. Her story “Naming” appears in the Fall 2019 issue of Narrative Magazine. It centers an immigrant protagonist — Sofia, Sonia, Sonechka — who moves back to Moscow in 1992 for a job copyediting “one of the many publications springing up in the newly liberalized atmosphere now that the Soviet Union had collapsed.” This is a delightful tale of search for identity, romance, a connection with the place, and, of course, books.

The story is available online after a free registration to the website. If it resonates with you, please leave a comment on the website, write back to us or to the author directly. Publishing short stories can be a lonely business, and the most effective way to support a writer is to comment on the work you love.

From early on, the most significant episodes of my life were bound up with books. I was reading Eugene Onegin when we left the Soviet Union, The Seagull when I lost my virginity, and the Russian realists when I fell in love, a process that spanned several authors. I was in my last year of college, in 1992, when I met Daniel, a graduate student. I caught him looking at me during our first class meeting for a seminar on nineteenth-century Russian fiction. He didn’t look away when I met his stare, which betrayed too much self-confidence on his part yet was oddly intriguing. We didn’t speak, but for the next few weeks I would continually feel his bright-green eyes on me. Daniel’s eyes were his most striking feature; they had the ability to bore into you with an unearthly intensity and leave you feeling as though you’d just been seen through to the inside.

https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2019/fiction/naming-yelena-furman

7 Russian Booker Prize winners and their must-read novels

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

There has been a lot of talk, including on this blog, about literary prizes, translation, and gender imbalance. The Russian Booker Prize is one of the country’s most prestigious awards. The writers in the title have had their winning novels translated into English, and there is also a list of other winners whose novels haven’t been translated but with links to their translated shorter works. Of the seven writers in the title, three are women: Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Kukotsky Enigma (2001, trans. Diane Nemec Ignashev); Olga Slavnikova, 2017 (2006, trans. Marian Schwartz); and Elena Chizhova,The Time of Women (2009, trans. Simon Patterson and Nina Chordas; my review here). But no prizes for guessing whether this relative gender balance holds true for the Russian Booker overall.

https://www.rbth.com/arts/331193-russian-booker-prize-winners

The NOS(E) Award’s 2019 Longlist

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Thank you, as always, to Lisa Hayden of Lizok’s Bookshelf for keeping us all up to date on prize-related announcements. We are happy to share the list here, particularly as it contains her very helpful, and entertaining, descriptions of the nominated works. Less happy is the subject we’ve talked about previously on this blog (and which, in the wake of the Nobel, some of us have debated in a – let’s go with “spirited” – manner on Twitter): of the sixteen titles, only three are by women. While no one in their right mind would suggest that gender should be the sole criterion for anything, really, there is a real issue with Russian literary prizes being overwhelmingly skewed toward male writers (googling the major award winners will confirm this in short order). This is not meant as a slight to any of the men on the list, but it is a question that needs to be asked, over and over, until we arrive at a workable solution: how do we honor good writing whoever the writer may be while at the same time ensure more balanced representation in terms of nominations and winners? Suggestions welcome; perhaps someone can forward them to the Russian prize committees.

http://lizoksbooks.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-nose-awards-2019-longlist.html