Category: Publication

Recent Publications and a Submissions Opportunity

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Book review, Newsletter, Publication, Publishing, TranslationLeave a comment

Friends, one day when we’re all old and gray, please remember to ask me what it takes for a Soviet-born Russian speaker to establish herself not only as a writer of English, but also as a translator into English.

Let me just say that I’m exorbitantly proud of myself for publishing my translations in two more US-based literary magazines. I’m so grateful to the Kyiv-based poet Olga Bragina for trusting me with her work and to the editors of the magazines for seeing what I saw in Olga’s poetry. It is so relatable and so heartbreaking.

Here are the links:

Two poems by Olga Bragina in World Literature Today

Three poems by Olga Bragina in Consequence Forum

Those of you who are writers might be interested to know that WTAW Press has asked me to be one of the jurors for their second annual Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize. If you have an unpublished prose manuscript (novels, memoirs, narrative nonfiction, essay and story collections, and hybrid works), the submissions are open until December 31, 2024. Please submit — I’d love to read your work!

As many of you know, WTAW Press published my collection LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES. This book turned 5 years old in September — and it’s not too late to buy it, read, and review on Goodreads and Amazon. All comments are always appreciated. Historically speaking, I haven’t always taken criticism well, but you know, I’m learning, and it’s good for me!

Three more links to this month’s publications:

My review of Shahzoda Samarqandi’s delightfully complex novel Mothersland, written originally in Persian and Tajik and translated to English by Shelley Fairweather-Vega from Russian by Youltan Sadykova. To write this review, I had to study up on the history of Soviet cotton production and the Aral Sea disaster.

On Punctured Lines, the blog that I co-run with Yelena Furman, we had two new pieces this month. First, my Q&A with Sasha Vasilyuk, whose novel about a Soviet WWII soldier with a secret Your Presence is Mandatory I highly recommend. Second, Yelena’s Q&A with Michele A. Berdy, a translator and editor extraordinaire who moved from US to the USSR in the 1970s. Wow, does she have stories to tell!

Reading at Martuni’s and new publications

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Publication, Readings, short story, TranslationLeave a comment

San Francisco friends: Come next Thursday to Martuni’s on Market Street. It’s a great reading series hosted by a wonderful poet James J. Siegel, and I’m so happy to be invited back. It’s always so much fun! Pro tip: the drinks are really strong.

New publications:

Thank you for reading! Keep in touch!

Olga

The Question and The Racket

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Event, Publication, short story1 Comment

The Question is my new short story, published by the wonderful Scoundrel Time magazine that has previously published my story Bananas for Sale, included in my collection LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES. Huge gratitude to Scoundrel Time editors Karen E. Bender and Paula Whyman.

The Racket is a reading series where I’ll be reading my work on July 25, at 7 pm. No official flyer for this event yet, but do show up at The Sycamore, 2140 Mission St in San Francisco, and help a group of us to celebrate Sasha Vasilyuk’s novel YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY. The theme of the event is ALL OVER THE MAP, and what a map this is that includes Sasha, Rita Chang-Eppig, Jacqueline Doyle, Yalitza Ferreras, and Lee Kravetz!

*** The Sycamore is currently my favorite bar in the city, where I hang out Tuesday nights with the crew from the San Francisco Writers Workshop. IMHO, it’s the friendliest watering hole for writers in town. Happy for you to try to convince me otherwise, but first come to the reading!

Make Peace with the Cake in the Museum of Americana

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Publication, short storyLeave a comment

I’m grateful to my friends at the Museum of Americana for publishing my story, “Make Peace with the Cake” in their Food Court section. Huge thanks to Lauren Alwan for editing!

Our Leo was six or seven weeks old when we received advice from fellow Russians, as we came to call ourselves after twenty years in the US. They had two kids in elementary school and when they shared their parenting philosophy, Sioma and I listened.

“We don’t do kids birthday parties,” they said. 

Birthday parties were a giant waste of time, they said. Treated as mandatory by middle-class Bay Area parents, no matter the racial or ethnic background, these utrenniki were all alike: a bouncy house at a playground, pizza, cake. One couldn’t drop the children off but had to hang out and talk to the adults. If you couldn’t sustain a conversation about baseball scores or local politics, forget it. “Remember how it was back home?” the dad asked.

TO CONTINUE READING: https://themuseumofamericana.net/2023/11/07/americana-stories-the-food-court-fiction-2/

Quieter Than Water, Lower Than Grass: Growing Up Afraid in Russia, my Essay in Narrative Magazine

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Essay, PublicationLeave a comment

I’m deeply grateful to my friends at Narrative Magazine for publishing a personal essay that was born as a reaction to the news of Russia’s new round of war in Ukraine. As so many people around the world, I watch the developing news with horror and with absolute certainty that Putin must be stopped.

On February 24, 2022, the day Putin ordered Russian forces to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I turned forty-three years old. As Ukrainians began to mount a fierce response to the aggressor, watching the bombs fall from afar, I was astonished and awed by their courage and determination to stop Putin’s army. I was also from-the-bottom-of-my-heart grateful. Like many of my peers who grew up in Russia, I have spent most of my life afraid of violence. I have not had the courage to face my fear but instead tried to outrun it.

I was born in 1979, in Leningrad, to a Jewish family. At about eight years old, when I decided I was old enough to pick up the family’s telephone, I took a call for “Nikolai Dmitrievich.”

https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/winter-2022/nonfiction/quieter-water-lower-grass-growing-afraid-russia-olga-zilberbourg

Particular thanks to editors Carol Edgarian and Mimi Kusch and to Jack Schiff for working with me on this publication.

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!

“Hold Your Breath Until the Future Comes” published in The Bare Life Review

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Publication, short storyLeave a comment

I’m very happy to have a longer story of mine published in the new issue of The Bare Life Review, a magazine for immigrant and refugee writers. Issue number 4 (they are published annually) has a particular focus on climate change. I’m deeply grateful to Maria Kuznetsova for her insightful edits that helped this story to become more dynamic.

The buzzer rings. The baby must’ve felt the quake in my body. He loses the nipple and screams. I’d passed out for a few minutes, but I’m certainly awake now, and I too want to scream. Did the baby’s diaper leak on my stomach just now, or is it sweat and breastmilk pooling between us?


The air ventilation system broke in my building a few days ago. It’s June in Brooklyn, and the heat is unbearable. I nursed Anton on the couch in the living room, and my breasts are covered in liquid. He’s tired, unhappy. It feels like the two of us are bearing the brunt of the global warming, and there’s nowhere to run.

The buzzer rings again.

https://barelifereview.square.site/product/tblr-vol-4/1?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false

The Bare Life Review is a gorgeous print publication. To continue reading, please buy the mag!

Review: Three Apples Fell From the Sky

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Book review, Publication, reviewLeave a comment

Thanks to The Common, a magazine dedicated to literature of place, and editor Nina Sudhakar for working with me and publishing my review of Narine Abgaryan’s novel in Lisa C. Hayden’s translation. I highly recommend this book, and if anyone interested, I know of a Twitter read-together group that’s planning to dig into this novel in March 2021.

A brave writer begins her novel with the deathbed. Instead of hooking a reader the way the proverbial gun on the wall might, opening with a death scene threatens her with the inevitable backstory.

Luckily, Narine Abgaryan is both a brave and an experienced writer. Three Apples Fell from the Sky is her fifth full-length novel, which won Russia’s prestigious Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award in 2016. Maine-based Lisa C. Hayden translated this novel for Oneworld, and after a COVID19-based delay, the book was released in the UK in August 2020. The novel opens with Anatolia Sevoyants, the protagonist, as she lies down “to breathe her last.” Soon, though, we learn that while Anatolia fully intends to die, life is far from finished with her.

https://www.thecommononline.org/three-apples-fell-from-the-sky/

I Give Up in Mumber Mag

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Publication, short storyLeave a comment

My flash “I Give Up” is now available in the second issue of Mumber Mag! I’m grateful to the editor Harry Leeds for his thoughtful comments on this piece, helping to make it less wordy and amplifying the sense of movement and breathlessness with which its overwhelmed speaker addresses the world.

The next crayon hit him right between the eyes. The next two hit the windshield and the car swerved, coming dangerously close to a refrigerator truck. My husband screamed.

In response, the two-year old started screaming.

https://www.mumbermag.me/2020/12/28/i-give-up/

The Mumber Two (OMG that title) is a delightful issue all around, worth reading cover-to-cover!

No Horse Required published in CALYX

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Publication, short storyLeave a comment

So proud to have a story in the current issue of CALYX. I wrote the first draft of “No Horse Required” in August 2008, that’s 12 years ago! Two years ago, the editors of this magazine requested edits, and one year ago, they accepted it for publication. A version of this story appeared in my 2010 Russian-language collection. For context, the story opens in 1992, and altogether it’s been quite a journey!

When I was thirteen years old, I yearned for a passionate and committed friendship modeled after the books I was reading. Never mind that I was a girl and that, in these books, friendship was reserved for a particular relationship between boys and men. These books were standard fodder for earnest Soviet children, complemented by selections from the international library: The Three Musketeers, Ivanhoe, The Pathfinder. I searched for blood friends, for true soul mates among my classmates, but the boys preferred computer games and the girls wanted to watch American movies.

https://www.calyxpress.org/shop/vol-321/

The issues are available on sale through the mag’s website. I have a few copies, DM me if you want one.