Dear Punctured Lines community — please help us spread the word about the next San Francisco Bay Area reading by writers born in the former USSR. This event is a part of San Francisco’s annual Lit Crawl festival and will take place at Ruth’s Table (3160 21st Street) on October 25, 2025 at 5 pm.
Continue reading “Owning Fear, Reaching for Freedom: Post-Soviet Writers + Translators Speak Out”We at Punctured Lines are thrilled to feature a conversation with Michele A. Berdy, longtime editor and columnist for The Moscow Times, now living in Riga, Latvia. Given both the political and personal upheavals of the last few years, this interview was long in the making. We are so glad to now publish this wide-ranging discussion about, among other things, cataclysmic changes, Soviet life hacks, art and culture, and of course, the war in Ukraine; there are many organizations you can support, including this one. This interview was conducted over email.
Yelena Furman: Let’s start with your intriguing reverse immigration story: you left the U.S. in 1978 to live in what was then the Soviet Union (the same year, as it happens, that my family left Soviet Ukraine for the U.S.). What inspired you to make that move, several years before the country began opening up under Gorbachev?
Continue reading “I Think that Everything I Do Is a Form of Translation: A Conversation with Michele A. Berdy”Today we welcome Masha Rumer and Lea Zeltserman back to Punctured Lines. They have both done Q&As with us previously (here and here), and each has participated in one of two different readings we organized by FSU immigrant writers (the recordings are here and here). We are extremely grateful to them for generating both the thought-provoking questions and answers in this exchange. This piece was a long time in the making, as all of us dealt, in various combinations, with the pandemic, the war, cross-country moves, and personal upheavals. We are thrilled to feature their wide-ranging and poignant conversation about immigration, writing, food, and more.
Continue reading “The Soviet-Jewish Experience in North America: A Conversation Between Masha Rumer and Lea Zeltserman”Today we feature three poems from the Russian-language anthology Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (edited by Julia Nemirovskaya; various translators; Smokestack Books, 2023). We are grateful for the following introduction written for Punctured Lines by Maria Bloshteyn, one of the translators of the collection. As she notes below, one of the featured poets, Galina Itskovich, is a therapist helping those in Ukraine; you can donate here to support this work.
Continue reading “Three Poems from Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems, edited by Julia Nemirovskaya”Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish (Graywolf Press, 2022) is a collection of lyric essays in which the author enters into a dialogue with ancient writers and contemporary artists, contributing personal reflections on the elusiveness of the trans body. The book is made up of 23 sections that converge on the theme of water. Most sections are further broken up into short segments or sentences set off by Roman numerals. In the first section, “In Water Disjointed from Me,” the author describes the way in which a mysterious illness upended their life and their ability to communicate. Four pages later, in “Last Night, A Pike Swam Up the Stairs,” Horn speaks to the experience of their trans body through short segments. This is the opening page of this section:
Continue reading “Perpetual Instability: An Interview with Lars Horn, by Natalya Sukhonos”FSG’s Winter 2020 Catalogue includes a mysterious entry: Untitled on Russia by Camilla Bartlett. The book has an ISBN number, but no title, and a one-line description: “A revelatory history of the new Russian elite by a finance journalist with unrivaled access.” I’m intrigued.
Punctured Lines 