There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

(Paperback)

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Description

'Thrillingly strange . . . Brilliantly disturbing . . . proves that the literary tradition that produced Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well' The Daily Beast In these blackly comic stories of revenge, disturbing deaths, midnight forests, magic and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales. 'One of Russia's best living writers . . . her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next' The New York Times 'As astringent as witch hazel, as poetic as your finest private passing moments . . . If there's any justice, this humble paperback will be greeted as the pinnacle of modern literature that it is' Elle Selected and translated by KEITH GESSEN and ANNA SUMMERS

Reviews

'Gave me nightmares ... These stories work the boundary states of consciousness like a tongue works an aching tooth' * Elle *
'A revelation - like reading late-Tolstoy fables set in an alternative reality' * New Yorker *
this short and rather extraordinary book of "Scary Fairy Tales" [...] succeed - in many cases quite hauntingly. -- Theo Tate * Sunday Times *
An entrancing collection of tales, as humane and unsentimental as Chekhov, as grim and funny as Beckett, as dark and unsettling as Poe. -- Brandon Robshaw * Independent on Sunday *
Penguin has given this book instant promotion to 'modern classic' status and it's easy to see why. It is an extraordinary collection of jet-black tales by one of Russian's foremost writers, which has understandably inspired comparisons with Tolstoy. Beat that. * Daily Mail *

Author Bio

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, including the New York Times bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby- Scary Fairy Tales (2009), 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, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself- Love Stories (2013). 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.