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

New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the World Fantasy Award
One of New York magazine’s 10 Best Books of the Year
One of NPR’s 5 Best Works of Foreign Fiction

The celebrated scary fairy tales of Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer—the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

Vanishings and aparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia—or anywhere else in the world—today.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen volumes of prose, including There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories; There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In: Three Novellas About Family; and a prizewinning memoir, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel. A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia’s most prestigious prize, The Triumph, for lifetime achievement.