We think of censorship as a political act, but systemic censorship affects areas that have the most remote relationship to politics. Why was Giacometti censored in the USSR? For similar reasons why today people are censoring rainbows. Discussion on Sat-- campaigns.telhilit.org/secure/cause...

🎙️ With history teaching facing heavy political interference, Russian schools are increasingly becoming hubs of propaganda. Episode 2 of the Russia Underground podcast asks whether teachers, parents and students can push back. If so, how?

Bizarre Exiles-- tomorrow! On Tuesday, November 4, 4:30 pm, I'll be introducing a feminist philosopher from the former Yugoslavia (North Macedonia), Senka Anastasova and her book from @routledgebooks POLITICAL NARRATOSOPHY, at Philosophers Club (824 Ulloa St). Come! #BookSky

If you're able to, please donate to this one if in LA, or to whichever your local one is. www.lafoodbank.org?_gl=1%2Aft21...

Bart Schneider will be presenting his beautiful book in SF on November 8. A wild, fictionalized story about the last few years of Giacometti's life, it's illustrated by a celebrated Sonoma county artist Chester Arnold. I'll read from my work, too!

To celebrate both next week’s release of Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories and translator @gayadorno.bsky.social being a Literary Host at tonight’s @wwborders.bsky.social Gala, check out an excerpt of this Kurdish novel @thedialmag.bsky.social. www.thedial.world/articles/lit...

Writing our listings email tonight If you have a submission call, competition, event, course or anything else writers would like to know about, please let us know!

I'm getting ready for an event about Giacometti, and wondering what specific ideological reasons made it impossible for Giacometti to be shown in the USSR? Do any of my #postSoviet scholar friends know or have a guess? Art by Leonid Sokov; The meeting of the two sculptures, 1994

San Francisco! This, tonight!

Huge thanks @elizabethmck.bsky.social and @chicagoqreview.bsky.social for publishing my personal essay "The Richest Kid in the World." It's about the fall of the USSR as told through the eyes of a pre-teen, censorship, & the way end of censorship in the USSR affected different generations.

Tomorrow! Rain is in the forecast, which I think is to be celebrated.

Tomorrow! Come Crawl with us!

Come Crawl with us on Saturday! It's San Francisco's @litquake.org season. We have great stories for you!

Saturday!

I hope everyone's enjoying @litquake.org ! Mark your calendars for next week --

San Francisco Bay Area: We’re a group of immigrant writers and translators born in the former USSR, here to push back against the growing threat to freedom of expression. Come to our Lit Crawl event at Ruth’s Table (3160 21st Street) on October 25, 2025, 5 pm. @litquake.org #BayArea

Preorder this anthology of Soviet children's literature at 50% off until Nov. 20: $15 paperback or $49.50 hardcover. All new translations by Anna Krushelnitskaya and y.t.

San Francisco people, come hear us!

I hope to see many of you at our Lit Crawl event on October 25, 2025. For SF Writers Workshop, our theme this year is "We've Got Notes for You!" Five of our current and former regulars will read their writing and tell us how workshop feedback has informed their revision process. #BookSky #SFevents

Thanks so much for reading, Eva! I'm glad to hear it resonated. Have you read Victoria Lomasko's The Last Soviet Artist? I found it really interesting—thought you might, too!

I love this essay so much!!

Don't miss @kristinaten.bsky.social on the blog with an essay about nostalgia, complex geographies, & the inspiration for her speculative collection TELL ME YOURS, I'LL TELL YOU MINE. Stillhouse Press, October 7, 2025--preorder! #BookSky #speculativefiction puncturedlines.com/2025/09/16/w...

Big thanks to @patrickbarb.bsky.social for chatting with me about the great Mariana Enriquez for @shortwavebooks.bsky.social. We talked: polluted places, collective shame, horror with a social consciousness, the “default” reader, the early internet, borderlands, and more.

This is a gorgeous, thoughtful essay by @kristinaten.bsky.social (with incredible accompanying photos) that stays with you. 🖤

Kris distilled the essence of nostalgia and search for identity in this emotional essay and it's no different than her collection.

An essay by @kristinaten.bsky.social, whose short story collection, Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine, is out later this year. @olgaz.bsky.social

On nostalgia and more by @kristinaten.bsky.social "The acquisition of the hundred-plus children’s books from my mom’s basement wasn’t exactly in keeping with this plan. So naturally I loaded them up [...] and set them up that day." puncturedlines.com/2025/09/16/w... @olgaz.bsky.social

Wrote a photo essay for @puncturedlines.bsky.social about nostalgia, Soviet-era children’s books, speculative fiction, and a recent trip to the country of Georgia. Come for the picture of baby-me talking into a mall phone. Stay for Svetlana Boym 💗 ➡️ puncturedlines.com/2025/09/16/

My book came out 6 years ago -- thank you WTAW Press for taking a chance on this collection. It made my world so much bigger and helped me meet so many wonderful people and find community. Huge hugs to all my readers -- forever grateful.

My book is available for pre-order from @nupress.bsky.social. 25% discount with code NUP2025 at nupress.northwestern.edu/978081014884... Only a few more weeks until it comes out!

This time, someone emails to subpoena records of my supposed coworker. —"The Double" by @yelenafurman.bsky.social https://www.fiveminutelit.com/the-double

Huge thank you to Susanna Baird and the team at Five Minutes. The journal's premise is to describe 5 minutes of your life in 100 words, and the piece was inspired by the event described in the first sentence that happened recently, yet again. I have more such stories, but they exceed 100 words.

ICYMI: An excerpt from Karolina Krasuska's Soviet-Born, the first academic monograph on Soviet-Born contemporary immigrant writers in North America. Thank you, as always, @olgaz.bsky.social for editing collaboration.

Lydia’s home is out of date and ill-fitting with the topography of Moscow as imagined in the story, which aligns with the way queer spaces are theorized. #BookSky puncturedlines.com/2025/09/01/q...

ICYMI: "Until more recently, Soviet-born Jewish writing in English has not featured many queer presences. At the same time, queerness has [...] become a defining [...] characteristic of [...] writerly and activist groups within the post-Soviet diaspora." puncturedlines.com/2025/09/01/q...

Lydia’s home is out of date and ill-fitting with the topography of Moscow as imagined in the story, which aligns with the way queer spaces are theorized. #BookSky puncturedlines.com/2025/09/01/q...

This week on @puncturedlines.bsky.social read an excerpt from Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction by @karolinakrasuska.bsky.social -- the first academic volume devoted to ex-Soviet Jews living and writing in the US, where the largest number of such immigrants resides.

How does a book’s cover change in translation? In our September issue, Veronica Esposito reviews a range of translations of the fourth book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, looking at how book cover design can change from language to language. worldliteraturetoday.org/2025/septemb...

“We did not know anything and they know too much,” is Lara Vapnyar’s quick comparison of sex ed in the late Soviet Union and in the contemporary United States. An excerpt from @karolinakrasuska.bsky.social's SOVIET-BORN on @puncturedlines.bsky.social. #sovietsex #ussr #queer #womenintranslation

Today, an excerpt from Soviet-Born by @karolinakrasuska.bsky.social "Vapnyar moves beyond the [...] Soviet era socialist gender templates based on productivity, according to which working mothers are dutifully bound to serve their men." Thank you as always @olgaz.bsky.social for editing support.

"The fact that this debate exists [...] testifies to the richness and diversity of this body of work that, like immigrants themselves, resists easy categorizations." Today on the blog, an excerpt from @karolinakrasuska.bsky.social Soviet-Born: puncturedlines.com/2025/09/01/q...

Kamianets-Podilskyi in Ukraine is a storied city. Mikhail Goldis's memoir, translated by his grandson Marat Grinberg, is his account of working as a detective and district attorney in the post-war years, first in Krasyliv and then in Kamyanets-Podilskyi. Excerpt: puncturedlines.com/2025/08/20/r...

"The court proceeded to question the victims. They were both of average height and muscular. Studying them, I wondered how the puny Khanukovich had managed to overpower these strong fellas."

ICYMI: An excerpt from Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine by Mikhail Goldis, trans. by his grandson, Marat Grinberg. @olgaz.bsky.social puncturedlines.com/2025/08/20/r...

For true crime fans: "An inebriated young man had assaulted patrons in a restaurant without any reason. The evidence was rock solid..."

Happy to feature this excerpt, w/ thanks to @olgaz.bsky.social for editing support. "I turned again to the man’s biography [...] twenty-one years old, a student at a construction community college and, as printed on the infamous fifth line in his passport—a Jew." puncturedlines.com/2025/08/20/r...

Today we have an excerpt from Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine by Mikhail Goldis, trans. by Marat Grinberg, his grandson. This book will appeal to those interested in the history of Jews in Soviet Ukraine, as well as fans of true crime. puncturedlines.com/2025/08/20/r...

No matter the age of their readers, these writers and artists choose to address personal and historical trauma through the medium of art - puncturedlines.com/2025/08/05/g...

Delighted to see Tatsiana Zamirouskaya back in San Francisco for an event at Globus books next Friday August 22, presenting her new book! www.facebook.com/events/17067...