”One of Russia’s best living writers…Every one of the 19 stories in Petrushevskaya’s “Th ere Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby” presents an arresting parable of this kind. Timeless and troubling, these “scary fairy tales” grapple with accidents of fate and weaknesses of human nature that exact a heavy penance. Short, highly concentrated, inventive and disturbing, her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next, a place where vengeance and grace may be achieved only in dreams”. – New York Times Review of Books

"Simply put, these stories are incredibly weird. But they linger in the mind as unsolvable puzzles: mysterious and undeniably seductive”. – More magazine

"These stories work the boundary states of consciousness – between sleep and waking, hallucination and realization, life and death – like a tongue works an aching tooth. You never know where you are or where you’re going, because the ground beneath the narratives is constantly shifting. You know only that the world you are in is as bleak as Beckett, as astringent as witch hazel, as poetic as your finest private passing moments”. – Elle magazine

★#34 in NY Times bestsellers list, #15 in Amazon.com in translated fiction!
★Rights sold to: USA,UK,Germany,France,Spain,Brazil,Norway,Denmark,Dutch,China,Turkey,India and so on!
★This book won The World Fantasy Award 2010!
★A master of the short story genre, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya dazzles the imagination with explorations of death, love, space, time and identity.
★Complete English translation available!

This Book contains a number of short stories of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.
In her magical-realistic stories that at once recall Kafka, Borges and Gogol, Petrushevskaya pictures the deprived and desperate - orphans, childless women, lonely elderly people - in search of love and happiness, in their struggle for life.
The fantastic (magical transformations, resurrection of the dead, living dolls and magical objects) merges here into reality, authentically captured by the author. Petrushevskaya’s signature
prose, harrowing and painfully sensitive, seems to strip off your skin, making your naked nerves shudder at the touch of this fictional reality that is much too close for comfort.
Here is a childless woman who grows a girl in a cabbage, or a girl attempts suicide and finds herself in a horrid, unlit apartment building chased by monstrous lorry drivers, escaping a split second before it is too late to come back to life. Set against a bleak background, Petrushevskaya’s “fairy-tales for grownups”, as the author defines the genre, are amazingly dynamic and ingenious.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938. Petrushevskaya studied journalism at Moscow State University, and began writing prose in the mid ‘60s. Her fi rst work was published in 1972, only to be followed by almost ten years of offi cially enforced silence, when the publication of her plays and prose was forbidden. At that time Petrushevskaya earned her living by working as a radio and television journalist and contributing to newspapers and literary Magazines. When her somber and disturbing absurdist plays were fi nally staged, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya became widely recognized as one of Russia’s fi nest dramatists.

　　A collection of short stories and monologues, Immortal Love, was published in 1988 and met with stunning success among readers and critics alike. In 1992 Petrushevskaya’s novel The Time is Night was short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize; it was translated into more than 30 languages and included in college courses as one of the most important novels of the 20th century. Since then, Petrushevskaya has published over 30 books of prose. Today, award-winning plays by Petrushevskaya are produced around the world, while her prose pieces have been published in more than 30 countries. Ludmila Petrushevskaya is considered to be the only indisputably canonical writer currently at work in Russia today.

　　In 1991, Petrushevskaya was awarded the Pushkin Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Germany. She has also received prizes from the leading literary journals in Russia. Petrushevskaya’s novels The Time is Night and Number One… were short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize. In 2002, Petrushevskaya received Russia’s most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement. Petrushevskaya’s play BIFEM was awarded the first prize at the New Drama Festival in 2003. In 2003 Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was awarded the State Prize of Russian Federation. The World Fantasy Award was received in 2010 for the short stories collection published by Penguin in USA.

“One of the finest living Russian writers… Her signature black humor and matter-of- fact prose result in an insightful and sympathetic portrait of a family in crisis”. – Publishers Weekly

“Petrushevskaya is a strikingly original author”.– The Guardian

“Told in an intimate, loose, over-the-backfence style, this is an alternately funny and desperate book – a welcome introduction
to a strong talent”. – Kirkus Review

“Thrillingly strange…Brilliantly disturbing… proves that the literary tradition that produces Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well”. – Th e Daily Beast

“The writing is beautifully controlled and the spirit large… She deserves a wide readership”. – TLS

“A wonderfully talented and significant writer”. – John Bayley

"The auras of Samuel Beckett and the baleful Albanian magic realist Ismail Kadare blend in Petrushevskaya’s work”. - Booklist, starred review