Description

The literary event of Halloween: a book of otherworldly power from Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer

Vanishings and aparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia-or anywhere else in the world-today.

About the Author

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is the award-winning author of more than fifteen collections of prose. The progenitor of the "women's fiction" movement in Russian letters, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world.

Keith Gessen is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and co-editor and founder of the literary magazine n+1. His translation of Voices from Chernobyl won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2005.

Anna Summers holds a doctorate in Slavic literature from Harvard.

Praise for There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby…

"Awesomely creepy."
--New York

"The most attention-grabbing title of the year...Undeniably seductive...Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov. And when she goes full-on gruesome...well, Stephen King should watch his back."
--More

"As bleak as Beckett, as astringent as witch hazel, as poetic as your finest private passing moments...There Once Lives a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby gave me nightmares. This celebrated Russian author is so disquieting that long after Solzhenitsyn had been published in the Soviet Union, her fiction was banned--even though nothing about it screams 'political' or 'dissident' or anything else. It just screams...If there's any justice, this humble paperback will be greeted as the pinnacle of modern literature that it is -but as Petrushevskaya would be the first to say, to hope for justice is to invite mockery. Better just to keep your head down and write...like this."
--Elle

"Mysteries, nightmares, magic: these stories are the fever dreams of a nation stricken by public disorder and personal anomie. They establish Ludmilla Petrushevskaya as one of the greatest writers in Russia today and a vital force in contemporary world literature."
--KEN KALFUS, author of A Disorder Peculiar to the Country

"Thrilling, delicious, and shuddersome. Lucky readers (I am one) reading Petrushevskaya for the first time will quickly recognize a master of the short story form, a kindred spirit to writers like Angela Carter and Yumiko Kurahashi. This is a feast of a book."
--KELLY LINK, author of Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen

"There is no other writer who can blend the absurd and the real in such a scary, amazing and wonderful way."
--LARA VAPNYAR, author of Ther Are Jews in My House and Memoirs of a Muse

"Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's deceptively simple tales unfold in a shadowy borderland between reality and nightmare, between life and death, where saints and witches walk alongside present-day murderers and drunks, where wintry woods and murky basements become matter-of-fact settings for the end of the world and Christ's second coming. This land is dark, haunted, often terrifying; but every ten or fifteen pages one is suddenly blinded by a bright flash of light-- some small act of humanity, some shy movement of soul, a heartbreaking moment of redemption or revelation--and the memory of that miraculous light lingers for days afterward. This is an extraordinary, powerful collection by a master of the Russian short story."
--OLGA GRUSHIN, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov