Li︠u︡dmila Petrushevskai︠a︡

Li͡udmila Petrushevskai͡a

Presents a collection of short stories about apparitions, nightmares, twists of fate, and mysterious ailments.

Scary Fairy Tales

There Once Lived a Woman who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Presents a collection of short stories about one-night stands, office trysts, elopements, and serial infidelity.

Love Stories

There Once Lived a Girl who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel--the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles--Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation--of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing--of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food--we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. "From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity's beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory." --Anna Summers, from the Introduction

Growing Up in Communist Russia

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

Three novellas from the celebrated, contemporary Russian writer,The Time Is Night, Chocolates with Liqueur and Among Friends describe the everyday, humorous lives of three different happily unhappy families. Original. 40,000 first printing.

Three Novellas about Family

There Once Lived a Mother who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back in

First published in Russia in 1992, The Time: Night is a darkly humorous depiction of the Soviet utopia's underbelly by one of the most brilliant stylists in contemporary Russian literature. Anna Andrianova is a trite poet and disastrous parent. Heading a household dominated by women, she can cling to the myth of the all-powerful yet suffering Russian matriarch. Challenging that myth is her headstrong daughter Alyona, a woman with appalling judgment and several illegitimate children, who both needs Anna and hates her.

Li︠u︡dmila Petrushevskai︠a︡

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