Punctured Lines

Aloud-Out Loud-Bart and Olga Check out Aloud-Out Loud-Bart and Olga by Telegraph Hill Arts and Literature!

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...

Covert Curricula - The Moscow Times Podcast | Russia Underground takes you on a journey to meet the Russians who continue to battle for free speech, artistic freedoms and basic human rights despite Putin’s brutal wartime crackdown, host...

🎙️ 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?

A poster with the seated figure on the foreground and Golden Gate Bridge on the background. The text reads: Routledge Author Senka Anastasova, PhD, Professor in San Francisco -- Political Narratosophy: Bizarre Exiles Against Authoritarianism, Intro: Olga Zilberbourg, November 4, 2025, 4:30 pm, Philosopher's Club, 824 Ulloa Street, Twin Peaks, West Portal, San Francisco.

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

Los Angeles Regional Food Bank Our vision: No one goes hungry in Los Angeles.

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...

A poster with two book covers. On the top right, Bart Schneider's GIACOMETTI'S LAST RIDE, on the bottom left, Olga Zilberbourg's LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES. The words of the announcement read: Bart Schneider reading from his new novel, GIACOMETTI'S LAST RIDE with writer Olga Zilberbourg. Telegraph Hill Books, Saturday, November 8, 6:30 pm, 1501 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, CA

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!

“The Competition of Unfinished Stories,” by Sener Ozmen — The Dial An excerpt from the book.

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!

Art by Leonid Sokov; The meeting of the two sculptures, 1994

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!

A pinkish-orange magazine cover of Chicago Quarterly Review, volume 42, Fall 2025

The Richest Kid in the World By Olga Zilberbourg I was stuck at home for the second week in a row. I had what I always had, bronchitis. My breathing was back to normal, mostly, and I was so well rested that I started waking up at the crack of dawn to read before going back to sleep. When I woke up again, the apartment was quiet. My parents were at work; my brother, at school; my grandmother, out shopping. Only grandfather was home, peeling potatoes in the kitchen to the dull drone of the radio. It seemed like the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union was always presiding that year, and if it wasn’t the Supreme Soviet, it was the Congress of the People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union. I knew important things were happening in my country. Every week, I received a youth newspaper where I read about the mistakes of the Communist party and the country’s turn toward openness and democracy. I saved the most important bits for the school wall newspaper. But enough was enough. I didn’t understand how my grandparents could listen to those debates from morning to night. I wanted to do something. I had my books, my record player, my notebooks, my colored pencils and my collection of paper dolls, the view of the yard from my third-floor window and the maple tree that I considered my friend, the flurry of snowflakes that were entertaining to watch for a few minutes while listening to Tchaikovsky on my record player… I had my homework, for goodness’ sake. But no, no. My heart yearned for something else. A battlefield, a sailboat, a ballroom, a surprise phone call, a piece of chocolate candy, anything.

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!

Book cover with a black background and stylized wildflowers on the foreground

A book cover with a Parisian antique shop on the background and two girls looking at a map on the foreground

An image of a blackboard with a stack of yellow pencils in the foreground. Text in yellow and white reads: San Francisco Writers Workshop Presents Five writers read their stories and share the feedback that made them great. Then YOU get to critique a juicy story, Live! Below: Author's portraits with signatures: Beverly Parayno Peng Ngin Tim Sullivan Jo Beckett-King Tony Tepper Below: We've Got Notes for You! October 25, 2025 Lit Crawl, Phase II, 6:30 pm Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street

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

Saturday!

A flyer displaying ten author's photos alongside three quarters perimeter. In the center left, in black, title of the event: OWNING FEAR, REACHING FOR FREEDOM: POST-SOVIET WRITERS AND TRANSLATORS SPEAK OUT on the right, in red: LIT CRAWL SAN FRANCISCO Below, in Blue: Sat OCTOBER 25TH 5-6 PM AT RUTH'S TABLE 2160 21st Street Sponsored by California Humanities and Ruth's Table

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

Congratulations!! Here's hoping it will get picked up super quick!

The correct address for Ruth's Table is 3160 21st Street! We'll update our flyer.

Owning Fear, Reaching for Freedom: Post-Soviet Writers + Translators Speak Out Dear Punctured Lines community — please help us spread the word about the next San Francisco Bay Area reading by writers born in the former USSR. This event is a part of San Francisco’s…

With Mirgul Kali, Yuliya Ilchuk, Elana Gomel @mor1233.bsky.social, Evgeniya Dame, Maggie Levantovskaya, Dmitri Manin @dmanin.bsky.social, Margarita Meklina, Yuliya Patsay, @sashavasilyuk.bsky.social, and Olga Zilberbourg @olgaz.bsky.social
Full event description: puncturedlines.com/2025/10/09/o...

A flyer displaying ten author's photos alongside three quarters perimeter. In the center left, in black, title of the event: OWNING FEAR, REACHING FOR FREEDOM: POST-SOVIET WRITERS AND TRANSLATORS SPEAK OUT on the right, in red: LIT CRAWL SAN FRANCISCO Below, in Blue: Sat OCTOBER 25TH 5-6 PM AT RUTH'S TABLE 2160 21st Street Sponsored by California Humanities and Ruth's Table

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

Firefly in a Box Contributions by Marina Balina, Sibelan Forrester, Anna Krushelnitskaya, Dmitri Manin, Svetlana Maslinskaya, Ainsley Morse, and Serguei Alex. OushakineIn Firefly in a Box: An Anthology of Soviet Kid L...

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!

An image of a blackboard with a stack of yellow pencils in the foreground. Text in yellow and white reads: San Francisco Writers Workshop Presents Five writers read their stories and share the feedback that made them great. Then YOU get to critique a juicy story, Live! Below: Author's portraits with signatures: Beverly Parayno Peng Ngin Tim Sullivan Jo Beckett-King Tony Tepper Below: We've Got Notes for You! October 25, 2025 Lit Crawl, Phase II, 6:30 pm Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street

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

We are accepting submissions on a rolling basis -- whenever you have something for us, please do send!

Ooh, if you ever write work based on your family background, let us know! We're interested in diaspora stories from that part of the world. Armenian diaspora is so vibrant and varied!

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!!

Top: Punctured Lines logo with black letters over white background and red stripes across. Left: The title of an essay: We Have to Go Back: Speculative Fiction, Nostalgia, and the Ghosts of Bookshelves Past, Guest Essay by Kristina Ten Right: Picture of a yellow book cover with pink lettering

words on a page: I have a tricky relationship with nostalgia. It’s a complicated thing when you’re a child of empire, more complicated when you’re a child of two. I was born in Moscow to a mother with Siberian roots and a father with Georgian roots, whose own father was one of many Soviet Koreans living on Sakhalin Island before being forcibly deported, under Stalin’s regime, in cattle cars to rural Kazakhstan and other parts of Central Asia (my grandfather was the only one of his siblings to survive this displacement). After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, my parents and I moved to the United States. I grew up in Arizona, then New York, going to summer camp and raising Neopets and marveling at the novelty of AOL Instant Messenger, and I didn’t give much thought then to all the things I write about now: empire, patriarchy, all the terrifying ways a repressive state can assert its power. These days, it seems as though I think of little else. Which isn’t to say I’m immune to nostal

words on a page: This species of nostalgia relies on a warped glorification of the past, with aims to influence the future. In Russia, it might look like Putin’s reinstatement of the Soviet national anthem in 2000; or, in more recent years, the steady reinstallation of monuments to Joseph Stalin throughout the country, monuments which had been systematically removed starting in the 1950s with the de-Stalinization reforms. In the States, it might look like a longing to return to “simpler, better times,” which, on its face, recalls some idyllic bygone era when it was socially acceptable to ride your bike to a friend’s house without calling first, to knock on their door, ask them to come out and play—and who doesn’t want that? But beneath this rosy vision often churns an undercurrent of traditional values about marriage, childrearing, and the nuclear family, along with anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment. “Back in my day, we would…” “Back in my day, we wouldn’t…” Remember the “good times,” these his

Top: Punctured Lines logo, black letters on a white background with red stripes. Left: Read Kristina Ten's Guest Essay on Punctured Lines Pre-Order TELL ME YOURS I"LL TELL YOU MINE from Stillhouse Press Right: Yellow book cover with pink lettering

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. 🖤