Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen volumes of prose, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York magazine’s Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPR’s Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction; There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories; and a prizewinning memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel. A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia’s most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement.
“Deeply unromantic love stories told frankly, with an elasticity
and economy of language, . . . dark, fatalistic humor and bone-deep
irony.” —The New York Times Book Review
“This gem’s exquisite conjugation of doom and disconnect is so
depressingly convincing that I laughed out loud. . . . On par with
the work of such horror maestros as Edgar Allan Poe.” —Ben
Dickinson, Elle
“Petrushevskaya writes instant classics. . . . These, as the title
proclaims, are love stories, scored to a totalitarian track.” —The
Daily Beast
“Combines the brevity of Lydia Davis with the familial
strangleholds of Chekhov. They’re short and brutal, but often
elegant in their economy.” —The Onion A.V. Club
“Full of off-kilter, lurid, even violent attempts at connection.”
—Flavorwire, 10 of the Most Twisted Short Stories About Love
“Petrushevskaya’s short stories are painfully good.” —Kelly Link,
The New York Times Book Review
“Heartbreaking, but . . . also beautiful and touching in describing
how, if not love, at least companionship, can save the most lost
souls.” —The Rumpus
“These bitter, funny, and often absurd tales of love between
unsuspecting men and women paint a bleak picture of Soviet living
and the frequent (im)possibilities of love.” —PopMatters
“An important writer . . . Russia’s best-known . . . She’s a much
better storyteller than her American counterparts in the seedy
surreal. . . . Petrushevskaya’s stories should remind her readers
of our own follies, illusions and tenderness.” —Chicago Tribune
“This is romance Russian-style, ‘tough love’ in its most literal
sense, yet somehow, its bleakness is more satisfying in its
humanity and aesthetic simplicity than the sugary appeal of so many
popular love stories.” —Rain Taxi
“Dark and mischievous . . . [Petrushevskaya’s] stories never flinch
from harshness, yet also offer odd redemptions . . . comedic
brilliance . . . microscopic precision . . . several inimitable,
laugh-out-loud paragraphs . . . creepy early-Ian-McEwan style
identity disintegrations [and a] formidable way with a character
profile. . . . [The translation, by] Anna Summers, [is] starkly
elegant, often wry. . . . Summers also provides a sensitive,
informative and insightful introduction. . . . Petrushevskaya . . .
ensures herself a place high in the roster of unsettling Writers of
the Weird.” —Locus
“Both supremely gritty and realistically life-affirming . . . Full
of meaningful, finely crafted detail.” —Publishers Weekly
“Think Chekhov writing from a female perspective. . . .
Petrushevskaya’s short stories transform the mundane into the near
surreal, pausing only to wink at the absurdity of it all.” —Kirkus
Reviews
“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.” —Elle
“Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and
the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov.” —More
“The fact that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is Russia’s premier writer
of fiction today proves that the literary tradition that produced
Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well.” —Taylor Antrim,
The Daily Beast
“Her witchy magic foments an unsettling brew of conscience and
consequences.” —The New York Times Book Review
“What distinguishes the author is her compression of language, her
use of detail and her powerful visual sense.” —Time Out New
York
“A master of the Russian short story.” —Olga Grushin, author of The
Dream Life of Sukhanov
“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
There Are Jews in My House
“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
“A master of the short story form, a kindred spirit to writers like
Angela Carter and Yumiko Kurahashi.” —Kelly Link, author of Magic
for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen
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