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Like Water and Other Stories Paperback – September 5, 2019

by Olga Zilberbourg (Author)
4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 36 ratings
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Fiction. California Interest. Short Stories. With settings that range from the Cuban Missile Crisis and Soviet-era Perestroika to present-day San Francisco, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, the first English-language collection from Leningrad-born author Olga Zilberbourg, looks at family and childrearing in ways both unsettling and tender, and characters who grapple with complicated legacies--of state, parentage, displacement, and identity. 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. In "Dandelion," a child turns into a novel and is shipped off to an agent in New York. In "Doctor Sveta," a young Soviet woman finds herself on a ship bound for Cuba at the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In "Companionship," a young boy decides to return to his mother's uterus. Anthony Marra calls LIKE WATER "A book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope," and of these stories, Karen E. Bender says, they "cast a clear, illuminating light on topics ranging from motherhood, the workplace, birth, death, ambition, and immigration, all explored through exquisitely wrought characters in Russia and the United States. Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now."
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    184 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    WTAW Press
  4. Publication date
    September 5, 2019
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0998801496
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0998801490
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Olga Zilberbourg is the author of three Russian-language story collections, the most recent of which was published in Moscow in 2016. Her English-language fiction and criticism has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, The Common, and Electric Literature, among many others. Born in Leningrad, USSR, she came of age during the country's disintegration, when the fall of the Iron Curtain created unprecedented travel and educational opportunities. Among the first in a wave of post-Soviet youth to study abroad and in the United States, Zilberbourg attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, the Goethe Institute in Germany, and San Francisco State University, where she earned an MA in Comparative Literature. She has worked as an associate editor at Narrative Magazine and currently lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ WTAW Press (September 5, 2019)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 184 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0998801496
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0998801490
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.9 4.9 out of 5 stars 36 ratings

Customer reviews

4.9 out of 5 stars
4.9 out of 5
36 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Yelena Lembersky
5.0 out of 5 stars A fanstastic read
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2024
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An honest and deeply felt book of stories, a glimpse into the soul of an immigrant living and growing roots in American soil
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Kathleen E Wheaton
5.0 out of 5 stars A multi-faceted gem
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2020
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Olga Zilberbourg's first story collection in English is a gem of a book. These brief stories--some only a few sentences long--are by turns droll, uncanny and heartbreaking. Her prose is so direct, so crystalline, I felt as I was magically able to read Russian in the original. She makes the familiar strange, the exotic familiar; her stories are as memorable and piercing as fairy tales.
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Amanda B
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful gentle trip into every day lives
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2019
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I loved these stories. They gently transported me into an immigrant, Russian culture and at the same time spoke very much to contemporary American issues. Some were fantastical, as when a child returns to the womb, but most spoke of the magic (the pain) of every day life. When I finished I was a little sad that they were over.
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Elise Frances Miller
4.0 out of 5 stars Imagination liberates the personal-political intersection
Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2019
Olga Zilberbourg’s “Like Water and Other Stories” fits into the intersection between the political and the personal, and always in the messy, surprising and unpredictable ways that liberate her reader’s perspectives. Zilberbourg’s incredible imagination and facility with this, her first English language fiction collection, offers up revelations about family life, parenting, friendship, workplace dynamics, Including academic workplace foibles, and all of those sneaky social and political structures often overriding our best efforts. With settings from the former Soviet Union and present-day Russia, to the east and west coasts of America over the past 30 years, she has plenty of political range to work with. And here is the best part: Zilberbourg knows what she’s talking about. She is intimately familiar with all of these worlds. Her characters and their personal experiences occur and evolve organically within their realities, while inventiveness is spent on characters, imagery, language, situations, with a few symbolic fantasies. Among my favorites, The Broken Violin and My Sister’s Game mark the moment in youngsters’ lives when they are forced by the thoughtlessness or cruelty of peers to decide who they truly are. And other favs, where a character walks a line between two cultures, such as Sweet Porridge, in which a mother must raise her own pampered child under completely different conditions from her Russian childhood. Whether a fully developed short story or a one line or one paragraph condensed idea, this collection will make you think, discuss, and reevaluate the sources and inevitability of your own personal experience. Bravo to this brilliant author on a stunning literary debut.
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Joseph Crescente
5.0 out of 5 stars Great prose, great collection
Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2020
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"Like Water and Other Stories" is a sublime collection filled with stories so condensed that they come out in just a few sentences, to longer tales about seemingly endless journeys at sea and conversations that never leave a room. It's about Russians and Americans and Russian-Americans. I felt grounded, yet the prose let me escape.
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John K Zeller
5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic, absorbing book
Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2023
Like Water is a riveting collection of stories that takes on themes of immigration, life in the former Soviet Union, parenting, academia, aging, generational conflict, storytelling, childhood, electronic communication, even AI! I flew threw it. Some stories, like “Infestation” and “Her Left Side,” are about the strangeness of pregnancy; many others, like “Helen More’s Suicide” and “Doctor Sveta,” bring together women of different generations dealing with both professional and personal struggles. All of the stories are moving; many of them are darkly funny as well, with a hint of the strange absurdity lurking beneath the everyday that reminds me a bit of Shirley Jackson, but Zilberbourg’s voice is distinctive in its own right. She has a special gift for capturing the cadences of storytellers at family dinners and gatherings, the strange poetry of everyday speech. I noticed this especially in stories like “The Swallow,” where a man named Stepan monopolizes a big family dinner with a story about all the things he burned in his wood stove to make it through a freezing winter in Yerevan. A fantastic, absorbing book.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Stories about the absurdity and beauty of life
Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2023
These stories offer a window into other worlds, while still highlighting the issues of this one. Time and place change, sometimes in ways that don't seem possible, but the characters confront the same problems we all do with families, careers and just day to day living. Deep insights end with the limitations of reality, be it the reality of the cost of transportation or the reality of others and our own shortcomings. Poetic, surreal, funny and tragic the stories in this collection offer an escape that reminds us of the absurdity and beauty of living. A favorite of mine was the baby that becomes a novel only to be rejected by the agent and returned. As crazy as it sounds, Olga makes it work and leaves you laughing and crying at the same time.
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Michael Karpa
5.0 out of 5 stars Ready for more
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2022
I am developing a taste for short-story collections that mix traditional length stories with flash fiction and microfiction (and in this case, a story of a sentence that's barely a full line). It really makes for a pleasurable read, because you get to slip into something new and stay there to the memorable conclusion ("Jannik's Score") and then do a quick, thoughtful in-and-out ("Email" and "One's Share," which are back to back) to freshen up the brain. Then again, we have artifacts from the non-fictive world like "How to Deliver a Genius" (I really don't think that was made up) that provide another very different type of grounding. Grounded is a good word in general for this collection, because it moves without disorientation for the reader between countries and cultures, Leningrad to California to graduate school. ("Graduate School" really felt like it needed a visa to get in to, and maybe a break through a barbed wire fence to get out of, though that may be me projecting.) I'm ready for more!
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Top reviews from other countries

Nero
5.0 out of 5 stars Surprises and delights
Reviewed in France on December 11, 2019
Verified Purchase
LIKE WATER is full of surprises and delights. Between Russia and San Francisco, these stories--long or minimal, realistic or chimerical-- take you into appealing, unsettling inner worlds, with exuberant voices, ambiguous dialogue, daring trains of thoughts. The humour, all along, is unique, never ebullient or quite dark but consistently, subtly contemplative.
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