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:
I was delighted to see my translation of a poem by Kyiv-based writer Olga Bragina in Cagibi. I have been experimenting with literary translation in a low-key way for many years, and I am very grateful to Olga for trusting me with her work. Two more poems from this cycle are slated to appear in World Literature Today and five more in Consequence, and I’m hoping to place more elsewhere.
A new fiction of mine, “Untrampled by Horses,” appears in Defenestration. It’s a humor piece. It’s supposed to be funny!
Bay Area Folk — on Thursday, April 4, I’ll be participating in a community writers festival at a university about an hour and a half north of San Francisco. An event organized by the wonderful fiction writer Miah Jeffra and his students, this will be an afternoon and evening program of readings and panels on writers’ craft and the publishing industry. Take a look at the full schedule.
At 5:20 pm, I will be moderating a panel “From a Reader to a Critic” about book reviewing.
At 7 pm, I will appear with my fellow writers published by WTAW Press and will read a story (or two) from LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES.
No need to register in advance. Show up if you’re able to! There will also be a book fair: a great opportunity talk to small presses, mags, schools, and buy your next favorite book.
How does one celebrate finishing a draft of a novel? Here’s my plan: I’m organizing an event with a few writers I deeply admire and whose books share some of the sensibilities that dictated my own. Transplants all, we write about the places that were important — perhaps, foundational — to us, churning memories into new stories. Please join me on August 6 for this ONLINE reading and conversation. Register on EVENTBRITE to receive the Zoom link.
Tamim Ansary’s SINKING THE ARK is set in Portland, Oregon in 1973, “Before it became Portlandia.” Barbara Barrow’s AN UNCLEAN PLACE is anchored to the campus of an experimental middle school in Atlanta, Georgia in 1992. In HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED, Tania Malik captures Dubai during the weeks and months of uncertainty as Saddam Hussein’s army invades Kuwait in 1990, and the world awaits US response. Alicia Rouverol’s debut DRY RIVER is set in California’s suburban Mill Valley during the housing market bust of 2008. Moderator Olga Zilberbourg’s work-in-progress, DON’T SHUT THE DOOR is set in 1990 in Leningrad, USSR, just before it falls apart.
Please support writers and literature by buying books:
Tamim Ansary is the author of The Invention of Yesterday, Destiny Disrupted, Games without Rules, West of Kabul, East of New York, among other books. For ten years he wrote a monthly column for Encarta.com, and has published essays and commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Edutopia, Parade, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Bill Moyers, PBS The News Hour, Al Jazeera, and NPR. Born in Afghanistan in 1948, he moved to the U.S. in 1964. He lives in San Francisco.
Barbara Barrow (she/her) is the author of AN UNCLEAN PLACE (Lanternfish, 2023) and THE QUELLING (Lanternfish, 2018), which was selected as a Gold Winner for Literary Fiction in the Foreword Indies Awards. Her short stories have appeared in FAULTLINE, SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW, CIMARRON REVIEW, and elsewhere, and she also publishes literary criticism in environmental humanities, women, gender, and sexuality, and nineteenth-century literature. Originally from Atlanta, GA, she has lived in New York, Germany, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and now Lund, Sweden, where she teaches literature and writing and lives with her husband, daughter, and pets.
Tania Malik is the author of the novels HOPE YOU ARE SATISFIED (May 2023, Unnamed Press) as well as THREE BARGAINS (W.W Norton) which received a Publishers Weekly Starred review and a Booklist Starred review. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Off-assignment, Lit Hub, Salon.com, Calyx Journal, Baltimore Review, and other publications. She lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area. More at www.taniamalik.com.
Alicia J Rouverol (she/her) is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Salford and is the author DRY RIVER (Bridge House Publishing, 2023) and co-author of ‘I WAS CONTENT AND NOT CONTENT’: THE STORY OF LINDA LORD AND THE CLOSING OF PENOBSCOT POULTRY (SIU Press, 2000), favourably reviewed in the New York Times and nominated for the OHA Book Award. Her stories, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in THE MANCHESTER REVIEW, THE INDEPENDENT, and STREETCAKE, among other journals. A 2008 recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation writing grant, she received her Creative Writing MA and PhD from University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing (2013; 2017). In 2019 she was an inaugural Artist in Residence at the John Rylands Library to develop a short story collection themed on place and migration, recently accepted by Bridge House Publishing. DRY RIVER is her first novel.
Olga Zilberbourg‘s first English-language book, a collection of short and flash fiction, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, was published by WTAW Press in 2019. It explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also explores themes of bisexuality and parenthood. It received warm reviews from a number of publications and was named a finalist in the 2019 Foreword INDIES Book Award. Zilberbourg’s fiction and essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Bare Life Review, Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She has published four collections of stories in Russia.
San Francisco Bay Area friends! Come help me celebrate the publication of my friend Richard May’s new collection of stories, BECAUSE OF ROSES. I got to talking to Rick at a Litquake event one year, when we attended an event focused on literature in translation. I’m so impressed with the geographic and cultural range of his fiction. He writes unabashedly about love that can spark between men at every stage of life, across language barriers, ideological divides, and in the face of grief and fear. It helps that love has chance, leprechauns, and roses on its side. I delight in the magic of these stories, their kindness, and the joyful appreciation of the male bodies.
APRIL 23, 2:30 PM
MANNY’s (3092 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103)
Rick has hosted several reading series in San Francisco, and he’s a great entertainer — I expect this to be a lot of fun with some surprises!
It’s such an honor and delight to be reading together with two authors whom I deeply admire. Tatsiana Zamirovskaya’s novel THE DEADNET (Смерти.net) is one of the most interesting, innovative novels I’ve read in the recent years, and when I heard that she’s coming to the Bay Area I jumped at the opportunity to introduce her work to the local literary community. In many circles Polina Barskova’s work needs no introduction: she is a poet of force, vision and integrity, and we’re lucky to have her teaching at UC Berkeley. Her recent book LIVING PICTURES was published by NYRB (trans Catherine Ciepiela) and her poetry has been widely translated to English.
Where: Adobe Books, 3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
When: Saturday March 25, 2023, at 7 pm
This event will be held in English.
The full event announcement:
Three writers born in the Soviet Union will read from their work and discuss responses to the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with an incredible flowering of poetry against war, yet we also must note the many voices that have fallen silent. As writers, one of our tasks is to find meaning in the unfathomable events that we witness. We reach into the past, into the institutional and family archives, to gather material for this work. The ongoing war makes much of this work impossible. Even the language in which some of us work—Russian—has become deeply stained by association with the Russian government. Yet we continue to reach for meaning in the past, in the stories we tell, in the emotional and bodily truths that we try to shape into words and language.
Polina Barskova is a scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, LIVING PICTURES (NYRB, 2022) received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is also forthcoming in German with Suhrkamp Verlag. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology WRITTEN IN THE DARK (Ugly Duckling Presse) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation. Barskova is a renowned scholar of World War II who has edited multiple volumes on the culture of the besieged Leningrad. She teaches in the Slavic Department at UC Berkeley.
Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a writer from Belarus, who moved to Brooklyn in 2015. She writes metaphysical and socially charged fiction about memory, ghosts, hybrid identities and borders between empires and languages. Tatsiana is the author of three short story collections and a bestselling novel about digital resurrection THE DEADNET. Published in 2021 in Moscow, it received great critical and popular acclaim. She is also a journalist and essayist, writing about art, traumatic memories, dictatorships and dreams.
Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. Born in Leningrad, USSR, she grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and makes her home in San Francisco, California. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.
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!
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…
Back in May, I read from my book and answered some questions for a new, Zoom-based reading series called BunkerLit. It was a fun event and the organizers posted the video right away, but things were hectic then (let’s face it, they are still hectic six months later), and I forgot to share this link here. Check it out. I’m hugely grateful to Brendan Isaac Jones and Amy Butcher for inviting me and for everyone who attended!
This Wednesday, May 27, I will be sharing a story or two and answering questions over Zoom as a part of the brand new BunkerLit reading series. I would love to see you there at 5 pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern — join the live meeting here.
Olga Zilberbourg 