There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, An - Softcover

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141198583 ISBN 13: 9780141198583

Publisher: Penguin PressClassics, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From Booklist

The length of this collection’s title is in inverse proportion to the brevity of the stories, a contrast neatly reflecting Petrushevskaya’s covert but stinging irony. She won awards and accolades for the fantastic tales in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby (2009). The scouring realism showcased here in 17 works spanning her long writing life is the narrative mode that made her famous and led to her being banned in her native Russia. These strange, violent, and devastating stories of love warped by poverty, anger, and pain embody the Soviet era’s soul-starving shortages of dignity, shelter, and freedom. Petrushevskaya’s afflicted characters are trapped in wretchedly crowded communal apartments and suffocating family configurations, bereft of privacy, comfort, and hope. Out of misery coalesce the weirdest and most warped of romances, some disastrous, some grotesque, some liberating, while mothers’ love for their children brightens an absurdly cruel world. Petrushevskaya’s phenomenal skill in coaxing radiance from resignation, courage from despair, makes for universal and timeless stories of piercing condemnation, sly humor, profound yearning, and transforming compassion. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin PressClassics
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0141198583
• ISBN 13: 9780141198583
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172