Author: Olga Zilberbourg

Olga Zilberbourg is the author of LIKE WATER & OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) and three Russian-language collections of stories. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Scoundrel Time, World Literature Today, Tin House Online, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. She serves as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop.

Donate to Organizations Providing Support for Ukraine

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Punctured Lines

For those watching in horror the atrocities committed by Russian troops in Ukraine and wondering what can be done from afar, here is a list of various types of organizations to support. Given the rapidly developing situation and the number of appeals from various channels, this list is by definition incomplete. If you know of other organizations please add them, and we will be updating, as well. We stand with the citizens of Ukraine, the Russian protesters, and members of the various diasporas who have family, friends, and ties in one or both places.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CdrWLAkEaOMV7fBbIWzHsgHmFz8s1GM6e_7a57oc3ug/mobilebasic?fbclid=IwAR1T0p33oG_2AJBbZcTgg8mr4DCKNuyiJElUi7AN7lMyXmmfIxUpplGv1t0

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Voices for Ukraine: A Words Together Words Apart Reading

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Punctured Lines

Many of us have been wondering how to help Ukrainians who are under a renewed attack from Russia. Poets Olga Livshin and Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach have put together a bilingual reading by poets and translators from Ukraine and the US. Read the event description below and register for the event happening March 1 at 12:30pm ET. This message includes links to organizations where you can make donations to support Ukraine in this time of war.

From Olga and Julia:

Amid the current catastrophe in Ukraine, a brutal invasion of a sovereign nation, it is more urgent than ever to listen to the voices of its people. While media provides overwhelming coverage, literature, poetry, and art are just as important for processing, coping, and surviving trauma.

Hosts Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach and Olga Livshin unite Ukrainian poets and their translators alongside US poet-allies in Voices for Ukraine–a transatlantic reading spanning from Kyiv…

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Olga Zilberbourg’s Year in Reading, 2021

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Uncategorized3 Comments

Thanks to Dorian Stuber’s very bookish blog prompt, I got a chance to reflect on my reading in 2021. It proved to be very meaningful as I move forward. Thank you, Dorian!

Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau

Today‘s reflection on a year in reading is by Olga Zilberbourg (@bowlga). The author of Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press) and four Russian-language books, Olga co-hosts the San Francisco Writers Workshop; and together with Yelena Furman runs Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about post-Soviet and diaspora literature.

Look for more reflections from a wonderful assortment of readers every day this week. Remember, you can always add your thoughts to the mix. Just let me know, either in the comments or on Twitter (@ds228).

El Anatsui, Fading Cloth, 2005

My reading life this past year was dominated by my role as a juror for the 2022 Neustadt International Literary Prize. The first task we were given was to nominate an author based on the quality of their writing. After considering (and rereading) authors from Yoko Tawada to Jenny Erpenbeck to Polina Barskova, I finally settled…

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Upcoming event with Kate Greene

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Here’s something to look forward to in 2022: I get a chance to do an event with journalist and poet Kate Greene about her book ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS — a personal story of Kate’s participation in a NASA-sponsored Mars dome experiment that dives into the history and culture of spaceflight.

Some of Kate’s biggest questions in the book explore the kinds of bodies that get to participate in space flight, pointing to how our human biases and social structures limit our quest for knowledge.

It’s an exciting, wide-book, and I hope that thanks to ZOOM many of you will be able to tune into the conversation. Huge thanks to Richard May for organizing and Folio Books San Francisco for hosting. Buy our books from Folio and register for the event here!

https://www.facebook.com/events/6719599694780166

Born in the USSR, Raised in California: Video Recording

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The video from our recent event is here!

Punctured Lines

Thanks to everyone who could attend our event on Saturday, December 4th, and thank you all for your engagement and for your wonderful questions. For those of you who couldn’t make it, here’s the video recording from the event and links to our work.

Seven immigrant writers read their fiction and nonfiction related to immigration, identity, family history and the mother tongue(s). Let’s talk about buckwheat and pickled herring with beets. What do you do if your children refuse to eat traditional foods? Or when your dying grandmother forgets English and Russian and begins speaking to you in Yiddish? Does a Soviet-era secret still matter when the country no longer exists? We explore love, life, loss and the nuances of living with a hybrid identity.

Masha Rumer’s nonfiction book, Parenting with an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children, is forthcoming…

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Born in the USSR, Raised in California: Immigrant Writers Read From Their Work

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This event has been a long time in the making, and I’m so excited to participate!!

Punctured Lines

Dear Punctured Lines readers — come meet us on Zoom, and help us celebrate the publication of Masha Rumer’s book! (In San Francisco? Come meet us in person, details below.) We’re so happy to welcome Masha’s newly published Parenting With an Accent: How Immigrants Honor Their Heritage, Navigate Setbacks, and Chart New Paths for Their Children (Beacon Press). Punctured Lines published a Q&A with Masha when this book was still in the proposal stage, and we’ve been following Masha’s Twitter posts about its development with great interest and anticipation. Now that this book is out and available for all to read we are ready to party (and encourage all of our readers to buy it)!

This upcoming event will feature Masha Rumer herself and our blog co-founders Yelena Furman and Olga Zilberbourg alongside the brilliant Maggie Levantovskaya, Vlada Teper, Sasha Vasilyuk, and Tatyana Sundeeva, all immigrant writers, all born in…

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Book Review – Like Water and Other Stories by Olga Zilberbourg

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What a treat to receive such a lovely review so close to my book’s second birthday!

Vishy's Blog

‘Like Water and Other Stories‘ is a collection of fifty two short stories by Olga Zilberbourg. That sounds like a lot of stories, but it doesn’t feel that way while reading the book, because the stories are of varied length – some of them are what used to be called short-shorts which run for a few pages, while others are just a paragraph long like a Lydia Davis story, something which is called micro fiction these days. There are some stories which are longer too.

There are two major types of stories in the book – the Russian stories and the American stories. Olga Zilberbourg is Russian-American and so she has given importance to both sides, though I would say that the book on the whole leans towards the Russian side. Many of the Russian stories explore the Russian-American experience. One of my favourites was a story…

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Review of Vesna Maric’s The President Shop

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn book, Book review, Prose review, Publication, Wonderful BooksLeave a comment

I’m happy to have written a book review for a new, to me, venue, a magazine called On the Premises, edited and published by the poet Ron Slate.

Vesna Maric emigrated to the UK in 1992, a refugee from Bosnia. A township in northern England funded her transportation. Sixteen at the time, having barely recovered from the shock of experiencing the first six months of the war, she enrolled in school where she soon recognized that “Yugoslavia had been a totalitarian state, that we had been indoctrinated, brainwashed, unfree, undemocratic” – unlike her new British neighbors who were “free of indoctrination” and democratic in practice. As she writes in an essay published in Granta, “The Fascist Within,” this information conflicted with the education she had received in Mostar where she had been a Pioneer and had been taught to regard England as a colonizing capitalist empire that teaches its citizens to value property over human life. How then to reconcile the two incompatible doctrines? What impressions of one’s world remain after we accept that the political history of any country, no matter how democratic it thinks of itself, is mainly a self-justifying lie?

https://www.ronslate.com/on-the-president-shop-a-novel-by-vesna-maric/

Please enjoy the review, and do buy the book!