Tag: Tania Malik

Sebastopol, Sevastopol

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Essay, Event, Publication, Publishing, Readings, TranslationLeave a comment

My next event is taking me to Sebastopol, California — a small town north of San Francisco, famous for its apple harvest. My friend, writer Tania Malik, invited me to participate on a panel in Sebastopol’s Lit Crawl this coming Saturday, May 17. I hope to see some of you there!

Built on the land first inhabited by the Coast Miwok and Pomo peoples, Sebastopol apparently got its current name in an 1854 gunfight between two gold diggers, one of whom, a man named Hibbs, barricaded himself inside a general store.”Hibbs’s Sebastopol!” cried the onlookers steeped in the international news of the day. They were referring to the siege of Sebastopol–an episode of the Crimean war–vividly described for the later generations by Lev Tolstoy in The Sevastopol Sketches, Alfred Tennyson, and others.

I, too, have a story that’s partially set in Sevastopol (today, we transliterate the Greek-inspired Russian name of the Crimean town most often with a “v”). In “The Green Light of Dawn,” first published by Epiphany Magazine in 2015, a young woman treks alone on the coast of Crimea, Ukraine to mourn a relationship–a relationship with a man who died, a relationship with her country that ceased to be. I will read the beginning of this story for this event, centered around the idea of “the road.”

My thoughts remain with Ukraine these days. I’m grateful to the editors of ANMLY, a literary magazine interested in experimental international literature, for publishing five more of my translations from the work of the Kyiv-based poet Olga Bragina. Olga wrote these poems in 2023, a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and I only wish they could be less relevant today. Russia is continuing its near daily bombings of the civilian population in Ukraine. Please continue donating to relief efforts if you can.

Earlier this month, World Literature Today published my prose translation of a story by Vsevold Garshin that I called “A Captive Palm.” First written in 1879, the story felt contemporary in its personification of tropical plants languishing in a hostile environment of an imperial botanical garden. As I write in the accompanying essay, I was inspired to translate this story by a set of coincidences and also because I’m fascinated with the longevity of plants and ideas—our contemporary dilemma of how to ethically and sustainably build a future in a world shaped by brutal colonial conquests rhymes with the revolutionary thoughts Garshin is attributing to his palm tree.

Thank you all for reading, staying in touch, and coming out to literary events! In the future, I hope to do more Zoom-based events for people outside of the Bay area. Here’s a YouTube recording from a Mom Egg Review (MER) issue release party a few weeks ago, featuring a great many wonderful poets and a few of us, fiction writers. I read the opening of my story “The Train is Coming.”

Introducing New Novels: Where Local Meets Global

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Book panel, Don't Shut the Door, Event, Readings, Wonderful Books2 Comments

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, SINKING THE ARK

Barbara Barrow, AN UNCLEAN PLACE

Tania Malik, HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED

Alicia Rouverol, DRY RIVER

Olga Zilberbourg, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES

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.