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”Thanks to those of you who could attend our event, Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War, hosted by the Wende Museum on March 28. We loved having you as our audience and hope to continue the conversations in various ways.
Thank you for donating to Ukraine Trust Chain. Ukraine needs all of our support. Please continue to spread the word and donate here: https://www.ukrainetrustchain.org/
The video from our event is now online:
Continue reading “Video from Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War”
This one of a kind reading brings together Soviet-born writers as they weave together an intricate story of identity, memory, cultural intersections, immigration, and war. From fiction to poetry, memoir and journalism, and work in translation, the reading presents a deep dive into the individual and collective experiences of the Soviet-born diaspora in the U.S. This free event includes a fundraiser in support of humanitarian aid in Ukraine and aligns with The Wende Museum’s current exhibition “Undercurrents II: Archives and the Making of Soviet Jewish Identity.” Autographed books will be on sale, courtesy of Village Well.
Hosted by The Wende Museum, readers include poets, writers, and translators: Katya Apekina, Yelena Furman, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, Julia Kolchinsky, Arina Kole, Maria Kuznetsova, Olga Livshin, Ruth Madievsky, Ainsley Morse, Luisa Muradyan, Jane Muschenetz, Asya Partan, Irina Reyn, Diana Ruzova, Timmy Straw, Vlada Teper, Sasha Vasilyuk, and Olga Zilberbourg.
Continue reading “Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War”2025 is going to be a big year for books written by immigrant authors hailing from the Soviet Union who now call North America home. Since 2021, I’ve kept a running list of books coming out from our community as a way to keep tabs and, frankly, because no one else was doing it. Last year, when my own debut novel came out, there were only 7 books out from our community, a couple of them paperback editions of 2023 novels. This year, however, we have twelve new titles, plus three books–including my own–being released in paperback. A recent record! I imagine the war in Ukraine might have had something to do with this increased output as several of the authors below engage with the war and the resulting refugee crisis. As the war drags on and the public’s attention on it wanes, this feels like an especially critical time for our voices to be heard. This is why I’m glad to see that our books are finding publishers and readers, and I hope that the incredible variety of books on this list is encouraging to other writers in our community. From poetry to dystopian novels to short story collections, nonfiction, and a cookbook memoir, check out the list of FSU books and please support these authors by pre-ordering.
Continue reading “2025 Books by Post-Soviet Authors”
On October 26, 5-6 pm at Manny’s in San Francisco, Punctured Lines will be hosting an event as a part of San Francisco’s annual Lit Crawl. Please join us if you’re able and help spread the word!
Continue reading “Passionate Thinking in Diaspora with Writers from Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova”A new novel set in World War II enters a crowded and hotly contested field. It is a particularly remarkable feat for a debut novelist that Sasha Vasilyuk’s Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) earned universal praise from celebrated writers across the former USSR diaspora community and far beyond. Gary Shteyngart wrote, “Wonderfully written, elegiac and necessary, Sasha Vasilyuk uncovers the history behind the recent headlines with great skill and grace.” Susanne Pari, author of In the Time of Our History and The Fortune Catcher, wrote, “An outstanding novel of sacrifice, love, and forgiveness.”
We celebrate this novel’s arrival with particular pleasure. A contributor to Punctured Lines, Vasilyuk participated in a number of events we’ve hosted over the years, and we’ve heard excerpts from this novel as she was working on one draft after another. In May 2024, Olga Zilberbourg interviewed Vasilyuk during a book release event at Telegraph Hill Books in San Francisco. The following Q&A is a follow-up to that in-person conversation.
Continue reading “A Character with a Secret Is an Easy Sell: A Conversation with Sasha Vasilyuk, by Olga Zilberbourg”San Francisco Bay Area readers, take note: for the second year in a row, Punctured Lines is producing an event during San Francisco’s Lit Crawl.
On Saturday, October 21, 5 pm at 518 Valencia, a group of Bay Area authors will come together with poetry, stories and essays centered on Ukraine. Several of these authors have been regulars on our blog, and we’re delighted to introduce a few new names to our line up from last year.
Continue reading “Punctured Lines Authors at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl”Punctured Lines is happy to announce an in-person reading by seven women writers who emigrated from the former Soviet Union and now live in (or in one case, coming to visit) Los Angeles. This event follows the original Embattled Homeland reading during LitCrawl in San Francisco in 2022, with ex-Soviet immigrant writers living in the Bay Area. Like its San Francisco predecessor, the Los Angeles event is in support of Ukraine, which has been defending itself against Russia’s unprovoked attack for nearly a year. While the reading is free, we encourage people to donate to the vetted organizations below. Many thanks to Sasha Vasilyuk for organizing this event.
The reading will take place on Friday, January 20, 2023 at 7 pm at Stories Books & Cafe (1716 W. Sunset Blvd.). Please RSVP here.
Update: there has been a venue change. This event is now happening at Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia Street.
Punctured Lines is co-hosting a Lit Crawl reading by six Bay Area writers born in Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova. Shaken by the horrific tragedy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we will read pieces exploring our connections, direct and indirect, to the part of the world we associate with home and exile, and where many of our friends and relatives are suffering as a result of the war. We work in the genres of nonfiction, literary and historical fiction, YA, flash, and other literary forms to tell our stories, and will read excerpts from our published and new work.
This event will take place at 5 pm on October 22nd at Blondie’s Bar Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia Street in San Francisco .
Elena Gorokhova’s A Train to Moscow (Lake Union Publishing) came out earlier this year to praise by J.M. Coetzee, Lara Prescott, and Kate Quinn, among others. Gorokhova was born and raised in Leningrad, Soviet Union, now St. Petersburg, Russia. After graduating from Leningrad State University, she moved to the United States, carrying one suitcase with twenty kilograms of what used to be her life. Elena is the author of two memoirs published by Simon & Schuster: A Mountain of Crumbs (2011) and Russian Tattoo (2015). A Train to Moscow is her first novel. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, New Jersey Monthly, and The Daily Telegraph, on NPR and BBC Radio, and in a number of literary magazines. She lives and teaches English as a Second Language in New Jersey.
Punctured Lines 