The New Adventures of Helen: Magical Tales

(Paperback)

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'One of Russias best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next.' The New York Times

At first glance, the stories in The New Adventures of Helen seems simple, even child-like, but a deep reading reveals satire and darkness manifested through classic fairy tale tropes characteristically upended by Petrushevskaya. These 'adult fairy tales' ask deep questions about gender, love, history, memory, and the future, taking place in times between history and the now. These stories, quirky but yet inspired by a confident hopefulness, will inspire and provoke English-speaking readers across the globe.

Reviews

We are likely to hear a lot more of this woman. Some October, perhaps, from the Nobel Prize committee. The Nation One of Russias best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next. The New York Times Book Review Petrushevskaya, now seventy-six and finally attracting the readership she deserves, [has] a ringleaders calm mastery of the absurd. The New Yorker Petrushevskaya writes instant classics. The Daily Beast Petrushevskaya is the Tolstoy of the communal kitchen. . . . She is not, like Tolstoy, writing of war, or, like Dostoevsky, writing of criminals on the street, or, like poet Anna Akhmatova or novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, noting the extreme suffering of those sent to the camps. Rather, she is bearing witness to the fight to survive the everyday. . . . [She is] dazzlingly talented and deeply empathetic. Slate This celebrated Russian author is so disquieting that long after Solzhenitsyn had been published in the Soviet Union, her fiction was bannedeven 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 Petrushevskayas fiction [offers] a glimpse of what it means to be a human being, living sometimes in bitter misery, sometimes in unexpected grace. Jenny Offill,The New York Times Book Review The fact that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is Russias 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 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 ofThe 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 ofThere Are Jews in My House One of the greatest writers in Russia today and a vital force in contemporary world literature. Ken Kalfus, author ofA 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 ofGet in Trouble, Magic for Beginners,andStranger Things Happen In her best work Petrushevskaya steers a sure course between neutrally recording the degraded life of the Soviet-era urban underclass and ratcheting up the squalor of that life for the mere pleasure of it. She does so by the steadiness of her moral compass and the gaiety of her prose. J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

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 Neighbors Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (2009), which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York Magazines Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPRs Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sisters 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 Russias most prestigious prize, the Triumph, for lifetime achievement.