A Literary Lagniappe. A Reading and Open Mic by Friends of Bergstrom Books

A literary evening with authors, translators, and a publisher, with a focus on Central/Eastern Europe and Azerbaijan.

Olga Zilberbourg is the author of Like Water & Other Stories. LIKE WATER is a unique portrayal of motherhood, of immigration and adaptation, and an inside account of life in the Soviet Union and its dissolution. Zilberbourg’s stories investigate how motherhood reshapes the sense of self—and in ways that are often bewildering—against an uncharted landscape of American culture.

Katherine E Young has published translations of several authors' works from the Russian; her most recent project is from the Azeri author Akram Aylisli. Set in the mountains of Azerbaijan just after World War II, Akram Aylisli’s “People and Trees” chronicles the wrenching transformation of traditional Azeri society under Soviet rule.

Ena Selimovic has published translations from Croatian, including the title "Underground Barbie." Maša Kolanovic’s Underground Barbie brilliantly captures the vagaries of childhood as innocence gives way to the horrors of the news and the intrigues of sexual curiosity. The idealized glamour of Barbie and Ken on an endless honeymoon morphs into make-believe scenarios that reflect the splintering social structure brought about by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s: politicians campaigning to define what it means to be a ‘real’ Croatian, a refugee ball with ‘disgusting’ dolls that are lesser than ‘genuine’ Barbie products, the discovery of a mass grave filled with headless corpses thought to be Ken’s mistresses.

Roman Kostovski is the Publishing Director of Plamen Press, a local small press, whose mission is to introduce and promote high-quality English translations of literature from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern regions of Europe, an area with a rich, multicultural literary tradition still largely unknown to the English-speaking world.

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