There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, And He Hanged Himself. Love Stories

From the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, the masterly novellas that established her as one of the greatest living Russian writers—including a new translation of the modern classic The Time Is Night “Love them,­ they’ll torture you; don’t love them, ­they’ll leave you anyway.” After her work was suppressed for many years, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya won wide recognition for capturing the experiences of everyday Russians with...

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife's face; and a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams. In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy,...

Love stories, with a twist, by Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer-the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel By turns sly and sweet, burlesque and heartbreaking, these realist fables of women looking for love are the stories that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya-who has been compared to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Beckett, Poe, Angela Carter, and even Stephen King-is best known for in Russia. Here are attempts at human connection,...