Tag: diaspora

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  

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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 on Olga Zilberbourg’s Like Water and Other Stories

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“In ‘Rubicon,’ which opens Olga Zilberbourg’s Like Water and Other Stories, the narrator, on her way to pick up her son from preschool, says, ‘spring came on hard and much too early this year, which must be why the dimensions of reality shifted.’ If the story’s realistic beginning gives the impression that this shift is figurative, it soon becomes apparent that reality really does alter: on a street in San Francisco, a young man she knew back in 1990s Russia, who is ‘still seventeen on this day in 2018,’ drives up to hand her a ‘TDK compact cassette, the exact kind he and I used to exchange in high school.'”

http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/review-olga-zilberbourgs-english-language-debut-like-water-and-other-stories/#.XaItf0ZKiyI  

A profile of Ilya Kaminsky

~ calisto239 ~ Leave a comment

The Guardian has published a lovely profile of Ilya Kaminsky, related to Deaf Republic, his second collection of poetry.

Odessa was a cosmopolitan place, a “city of laughter” in which poetry was revered, and from an early age Kaminsky wrote and learned it by heart. When he was 12 his prose writing was published in the local newspaper, after he answered a call-out to schoolchildren to contribute, because the paper had no money to pay journalists. At 15, though he thought of poetry as “a private thing”, he produced his first chapbook. He had graduated from school by the time the family was forced into exile.

Olga Zilberbourg on Keith Gessen’s “A Terrible Country”

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

” Novels about Russia written in English for a U.S. audience are numerous enough that they could be grouped into a genre of their own. Keith Gessen’s second novel, “A Terrible Country,” is a solid contribution to this genre, particularly promising because of the author’s deep personal connection to the country and his prior body of work as a journalist, an analyst and a critic of Russia.”

https://www.sfchronicle.com/books/article/A-Terrible-Country-by-Keith-Gessen-13184005.php

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?

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

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment
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

“An eternal vagabond of life and the idea” #victorserge @nyrbclassics

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

kaggsysbookishramblings's avatarKaggsy's Bookish Ramblings

Notebooks 1936-1947 by Victor Serge
Translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman

As I’ve mentioned on the Ramblings (and on any kind of social media I happen to be near!), I’ve been rather absorbed in the Notebooks of Victor Serge over the past couple of weeks. The very wonderful NYRB Classics seem to fly the flag for him; several of his novels and his “Memoirs of Revolutionary” are available in their imprint (and I’ve read most of them…) However, this volume really is something special, and I’ll share some thoughts on it below – though I fear these will not really do the book justice. I’m sorry – this is going to be a long post!

The Notebooks

Serge’s real name was Victor Lvovich Kibalchich and he was born in Brussels to Russian parents. His life was a peripatetic one, moving from place to place – France, Spain, Russia to…

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

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

“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