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

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In these dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya tells of strange encounters in claustrophobic communal apartments, ill-fated holiday romances, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, tentative courtships, rampant infidelity, tender devotion and terrifying madness. By turns sly and sweet, earthy and sublime, these fables of flawed love blend black humour and macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace.

One of Russia's best living writers ... her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next

Petrushevskaya proves that the literary tradition that produced Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Babel is alive and well

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938 and is the only indisputable canonical writer currently writing in Russian today. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, among them the short novel The Time: Night, shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 1992, and Svoi Krug, a modern classic about the 1980's Soviet intelligentsia. Petrushevskaya is equally important as a playwright: since the 1980s her numerous plays have been staged by the best Russian theater companies. In 2002, Petrushevskaya received Russia's most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement. She lives in Moscow.

Through the Wall

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in Moscow in 1938 and is the only  indisputable canonical writer currently writing in Russian today. She is  the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, among them the  short novel The Time: Night, shortlisted for the Russian Booker  Prize in 1992, and Svoi Krug, a modern classic about the 1980's  Soviet intelligentsia. Petrushevskaya is equally important as a  playwright: since the 1980s her numerous plays have been staged by the  best Russian theater companies. In 2002, Petrushevskaya received  Russia's most prestigious literary prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement.   She lives in Moscow.

'There once lived a woman who was so fat, she couldn't fit in a taxi, and when going into the subway she took up the whole width of the escalator' 
 
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been acclaimed as one of Russia's greatest living writers. These five dreamlike and blackly comic stories, two of which are here in English for the first time, tell of lost children, midnight forests, strange transformations, cruel curses, grief and resilience, in the darkest of modern fairy tales. 
 
This book contains Through the Wall and Anna and Maria.

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

'Gave me  nightmares ... These stories work the boundary states of  consciousness  like a tongue works an aching tooth'

'A revelation - like reading late-Tolstoy  fables set in an alternative  reality'

this short and rather extraordinary book of "Scary Fairy Tales" [...] succeed - in many cases quite hauntingly.

An entrancing collection of tales, as humane and unsentimental as Chekhov, as grim and funny as Beckett, as dark and unsettling as Poe.

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.

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, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Three Novellas About Family

Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, and the grinding struggle to survive against the crushing realities of the Soviet system: in Among Friends, a doting mother commits an atrocious act against her beloved son in an attempt to secure his future; The Time: Night examines the suicide of the great Russian poetess Anna Andreevna with heartbreaking clarity; while in Chocolates with Liqueur the struggle for ownership of an apartment between a nurse and a madman turns murderous. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, the psychological perceptiveness of Dostoevsky, and the bleak absurdities of Beckett, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why she is Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Praise for There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In

One of Russia's best living writers ... her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next

Books by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

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