Trial by Fire tells a story of a devastating fire at a nightclub in Rhode Island that killed 100 people and injured hundreds. It took fifteen years to find out why this happened and who was responsible. Bestselling author and three-time Emmy Award-winning journalist Scott James, who was also a San Francisco Writers Workshop regular earlier in his career, investigates all the central figures. Drawing on firsthand accounts, interviews with many involved, and court documents, James explores the rush to judgment about what happened that left the victims and their families, whose stories he also tells, desperate for justice.
Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also dives into topics of bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Anthony Marra called it “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope,” and Karen Bender said, “Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.”
Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California. She has published four collections of stories in Russia, including most recent Задержи дыхание [Hold Your Breath] from Vremya Press. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.
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