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puncturedlines.bsky.social
Punctured Lines
@puncturedlines.bsky.social
140 followers 180 following 46 posts
Post-Soviet Literature in and outside the Former Soviet Union. Blog by Yelena Furman @yelenafurman.bsky.social and Olga Zilberbourg
@olgaz.bsky.social

http://puncturedlines.com
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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
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
October 9, 2025 at 5:35 PM
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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...
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
September 25, 2025 at 6:50 PM
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Today on the blog: A list of graphic memoirs and novels of Soviet trauma, written by women with personal or familial connections to the former USSR.

Y Nayberg, Lena Wolf, @rutasepetys.bsky.social, @verabrosgol.bsky.social, J Aleskeyeva, A Ulinich, H Moisseinen

puncturedlines.com/2025/08/05/g...
Collage of seven book covers
August 6, 2025 at 6:00 PM
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2025 Books by Post-Soviet Authors -- Thanks to @sashavasilyuk.bsky.social for keeping track of all the upcoming 2025 books by immigrant writers from the former USSR, writing in English and publishing in the US. Take a look -- it's quite a bounty of riches!

Authors include: @shustry.bsky.social,
A screenshot from the website PuncturedLines.com. A banner with old manuscript and samizdat pages at the top followed by the website content below. The opening post lines read: 2025 Books by Post-Soviet Authors February 11, 2025 ~ Sasha Vasilyuk ~ Edit"2025 Books by Post-Soviet Authors" 2025 is going to be a big year for books written by immigrant authors hailing from the Soviet Union who now call North America home. Since 2021, I’ve kept a running list of books coming out from our community as a way to keep tabs and, frankly, because no one else was doing it. Last year, when my own debut novel came out, there were only 7 books out from our community, a couple of them paperback editions of 2023 novels. This year, however, we have twelve new titles, plus three books–including my own–being released in paperback. A recent record! I imagine the war in Ukraine might have had something to do with this increased output as several of the authors below engage with the war and the resulting refugee crisis.
February 11, 2025 at 6:33 PM