Tag: Russian-American fiction

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

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  

New Book: Katia Raina’s Castle of Concrete

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to Lea Zeltserman and her Soviet Samovar newsletter for the mention of this novel. This is labeled as “Young Adult,” which means might fly under the radar when I look at reviews of contemporary fiction. This also means, it might be a gripping and fast-paced read. The description and preview of the first few pages are certainly promising.

Sonya is a daughter of a “dissident poetess moneyless famous jobless” mother, who had nearly aborted her. Jewish, too–being Jewish in the Soviet Union seems to be a major theme of this book. The novel takes place just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and emigration looms large. Sounds both familiar and intriguing.

Publisher: Young Europe Books

Agent: Jessica Regel

Upcoming Book: Lara Vapnyar’s Divide Me by Zero

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

I’m thrilled to report that Tin House is publishing Lara Vapnyar’s new novel. It’s available on pre-order, and I recommend that you pre-order it now to make sure to reserve your copy!

As a reformed math school student (Leningrad, 239 shkola), I can never get enough of math stories in fiction. The publisher’s description makes this book sound delicious:

As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Half-mad with grief, Katya turns to the unfinished notes for her mother’s last textbook, hoping to find guidance in mathematical concepts.

With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United States. She is, by turns, an adrift newlywed, an ESL teacher in an office occupied by witches and mediums, a restless wife, an accomplished writer, a flailing mother of two, a grieving daughter, and, all the while, a woman in love haunted by a question: how to parse the wild, unfathomable passion she feels through the cool logic of mathematics?

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

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

Russians in the Catskills – Tablet Magazine

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Tablet Magazine has published an excerpt from Maxim D. Shrayer’s new book, A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas. The book is upcoming September, 2019 from Cherry Orchard Books (gotta love the name of the press) and is already available for preorder.

The novellas feature episodes from the life of Simon Reznikov, a young Soviet Jewish man who immigrates to the United States with his parents and studies literature in New England. How will his future turn out? He can’t see the next turn his life will take ahead of time, yet, once that turn comes, there are ways in which it has been completely predictable.