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

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

by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Keith Gessen (Translator), Anna Summers (Translator)

3.62 of 5 stars 3.62 · rating details · 1,013 ratings · 208 reviews

The literary event of Halloween: a book of otherworldly power from Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer

Vanishings and apparitions, 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 th...more

Paperback, 206 pages

Published September 29th 2009 by Penguin Books Ltd (first published September 3rd 2009)

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Jul 11, 2012 J. Ergo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adventure, esoterica, fairy-tales, fantasy, humor, fiction, short-stories, supernatural, apocalyptic, culture, occult, philosophy, reviewed

I'm afraid I don't have time to be fair or do justice to how good this collection of nineteen stories, divided into Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems, and Fairy Tales, really is. I grabbed it up at work for the title and the book cover alone.

I love modern or post-modern fairy tale collections, be they updates, reinterpretations, deconstructions; or completely original, yet undeniably belonging to the tradition of folk tales, myths, and fables. My favorites include Donald Barthelm...more I'm afraid I don't have time to be fair or do justice to how good this collection of nineteen stories, divided into Songs of the Eastern Slavs, Allegories, Requiems, and Fairy Tales, really is. I grabbed it up at work for the title and the book cover alone.

I love modern or post-modern fairy tale collections, be they updates, reinterpretations, deconstructions; or completely original, yet undeniably belonging to the tradition of folk tales, myths, and fables. My favorites include Donald Barthelme's Snow White, The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse, Robert Coover's A Child Again and Stepmother, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, and, particularly, The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six by Jonathon Keats. And while comparisons to Hesse and Carter are not completely without merit, Ludmilla Petrushsevkaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales is more the heir to Nikolai Gogol and brings to my mind the supernatural tales of Ambrose Bierce. Her characters drift in amnesiac states through moments, days, years and lives of experiences they rarely understand, either during or after. Some similarities to Shirley Jackson's short stories also make sense, but in Petrushevskaya's tales, there is a different rendering of the grotesque; sometimes terrifying and others comical, but proportionally more chimerical to fairy tales than ghost stories in nature.

In their introduction, Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (who also selected and translated the tales) give a brief history of Ludmilla Petrushsevkaya's fascinating life from virtually unpublishable author, despite writing "so far from explicitly themes (that) should be banned," to instant "major figure in Russian letters" upon the publication of first collection of stories Immortal Love in 1987. In the years that followed her reputation grew as her other work became available. In addition to being a novelist, playwright, and poet, she is a singer/songwriter and "has recently been performing a one-woman cabaret while wearing an enormous hat."

I'd heartily recommend this to anyone who enjoyed any of the works mentioned above, as well as to fans of Poe, the Grimms, Calvino's Italian Folktale, and particularly Jewish supernatural tales.(less)

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May 17, 2010 Ryan Mishap rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: novel

I'm not sure what to say about this....

I like the creepy atmosphere and otherworldly intrusions into our world that are described in these short stories, but can't help but feel that something was lost in translation.

I am fairly intuitive and able to synthesize stories cogently so that I can render short explanations of them that make quick sense, but I am unable to do so here. I can't help but feel like I am missing something in almost every story here. Whether this is due to a failure on my p...more

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Feb 08, 2012 Nesa Sivagnanam rated it 5 of 5 stars

In one story, “The Black Coat,” a girl hitches a ride on a cold night, disembarks at a desolate housing project and meets a strange woman who teaches her how to strike matches that may take her out of a nightmarish life — a life she may already have left.

Jealous of her neighbor in a communal apartment — an unmarried woman, like herself, whose pregnancy has disrupted their friendship — she booby-traps their common space with boxes of needles and buckets of bleach and boiling water, hoping an ac...more In one story, “The Black Coat,” a girl hitches a ride on a cold night, disembarks at a desolate housing project and meets a strange woman who teaches her how to strike matches that may take her out of a nightmarish life — a life she may already have left.

Jealous of her neighbor in a communal apartment — an unmarried woman, like herself, whose pregnancy has disrupted their friendship — she booby-traps their common space with boxes of needles and buckets of bleach and boiling water, hoping an accident will befall the unsuspecting mother’s young child. Will the woman in "Revenge" succeed in her cruel plan — and, if so, will she be punished?

In “Hygiene,” a repugnant man with a bald scalp “covered with the thinnest layer of pink skin, like the foam atop boiling milk,” suddenly knocks on a family’s door, bringing news of a deadly plague.

A vacationer in “The God Poseidon” runs into a hapless acquaintance in a seaside town and discovers that this friend, “who’d never even had decent underwear,” has married and moved into a magnificent mansion. Returning to Moscow, she learns the encounter couldn’t have happened. Why?

“Incident at Sokolniki,” is so very short — two pages. “Early in the war in Moscow there lived a woman named Lida. Her husband was a pilot, and she didn’t love him very much, but they got along well enough.” When the husband’s plane is shot down, the widow attends his funeral. But two months later, a “strange young man, very malnourished and pale,” begins following her. “Don’t you recognize me?” he asks. “I’m your husband.” Accepting his return without emotion, Lida accompanies him to the forest in which his plane crashed, where he wants her to bury the flight suit he’d left behind in a pit. After hours of shoveling, she realizes her husband has vanished. Back home, exhausted, she falls asleep. “In her dream her husband came to her and said, ‘Thank you, Lida, for burying me.’ ” With this visitation, Petrushevskaya conjures a stark and unbreakable bond, all the more powerful in its lack of false tenderness. A husband returns from the grave not to rekindle love or remembrance but to get his ungrieving widow to grant him a decent burial. Duty, not love, is the marriage vow she must keep.

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Jan 09, 2011 For Books' Sake rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Combining allegorical commentary about life in Soviet Russia with folkloric characters and imagery, these stories centre around prophecies, poltergeists, underworlds, omens, insanity and amnesia.

Paying tribute to the Russian tradition of oral storytelling, some of the stories feature familiar fairytale figures, such as twin ballerinas cursed by an evil magician and a miniature baby found in a cabbage, living in a hollowed-out bean in a matchbox.

But there is no comfort in the readers’ recognition...more

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Nov 18, 2010 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, lit-russia, modern-fairy-tales, ghost-fiction, fantasy-dark

The story referred to in the title is the one called "Revenge". It's aptly titled because it is about relationships.

I love this book.

I've only read one short story by Petrushevskaya in another collection. I picked this up over the weekend at a bookstore. I had heard good things about it.

It's nice to know that sometimes the hype is correct.

This book is a collection of Petrushevskaya's more fairy tale genre fiction, so fantasy, magic realism, and fairy tale. It is split into four different section...more

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Nov 16, 2010 g026r rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, short-stories

There's a decent amount of Russian literature on my bookshelves, but from an age standpoint most of it dates from the Khrushchev Thaw or earlier, with a little bit sneaking into the early Brezhnev years. As a consequence of that I've been trying to read more contemporary Russian authors — a somewhat difficult task due to the dearth of translations of their works. (e.g. Vladimir Sorokin, by some accounts one of the most popular authors in modern Russian literature, has had a grand total of 2 book...more

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Nov 14, 2010 Sian Jones rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy-scifi, literature

I read this twice in a row, because the first time wasn't enough to admire its craft. Petushevskaya uses the simplicity of the fairy tale form to comment on the bleakness and brutality of late 20th/early 21st-century life. Her settings are in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, but (not to put too nihilist a point on it) any reader in a post-industrialized society can empathize with the naked isolation, the disconnection, the chaos as national, local, and familial bonds break and splinter. She uses t...more

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Feb 13, 2010 Stephanie D. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Vanishings and apparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt this book of otherworldly power by Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer, 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.

Twisted, ghostly, and apocalyptic describe these tales, wi...more Vanishings and apparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt this book of otherworldly power by Russia’s preeminent contemporary fiction writer, 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.

Twisted, ghostly, and apocalyptic describe these tales, with characters that are on the brink of madness or despair. Most start out like simple, but slightly off folk tales – There once lived a woman whose son hanged himself, There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life, There once lived a girl who found herself in an unknown place, on a cold winter night.

Then suddenly the stories take us out of ordinary existence and into strange, nightmarish worlds, described by the author as “orchards of unusual possibilities.”

Some recognizable tropes appear, but the landscape is completely unfamiliar and disconcerting. Instead of a child lost in the woods, we have a father with no children, a husband with no wife. He has no memory of who his family is and yet he keeps searching for them.

There once lived a father who couldn’t find his children. He went everywhere, asked everyone—had his little children come running in here? But whenever people responded with the simplest of questions—“What do they look like?” “What are their names?” “Are they boys or girls?”—he didn’t know how to answer. He simply knew that his children were somewhere, and he kept looking.

What starts out seemingly as a ghost story, There’s Someone in the House, becomes something quite different. Who or what is the woman in the house battling against? A ghost, her daughter or herself?

…Someone is secretly, soundlessly creeping from room to room. That’s how it seems.

The woman doesn’t tell anyone about her poltergeist: It’s still hiding, not knocking, not causing mischief, not setting anything on fire. The refrigerator isn’t hooping around the apartment; the poltergeist isn’t chasing her into a corner. Really there is nothing to complain about.

But something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy, sneaking and slithering along the floor…

A mother frets over her Thumbelina-sized cabbage patch child

Profound illumination comes to a woman lost in the woods with nothing but matches to light her way.

A family quarantines itself when a disfiguring infectious disease ravages their town

In these realms of the unusual, nothing is ever straightforward or neatly wrapped up; like disturbing dreams from which one awakens, they are not easily explained or forgotten.(less)

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Jan 25, 2010 Stephen rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is subtitled "Scary Fairy Tales." Well, perhaps. But I did not find Petrushevskaya's wonderful collection of stories particularly scary, nor do I feel comfortable with the term "fairy tales." In fact, the closest I can come in my own lexicon for a term to describe this collection is from classical Chinese: 志怪 zhiguai. Loosely translated, this meas something like "accounts of the bizarre" and refers to a genre of Chinese stories that became particularly popular during the Six Dynasties...more

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Dec 31, 2009 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

A beguilingly good book, and one that I hope inaugurates a long run of new translations of Petrushevskaya's work-- a book a year like this would really thrill me, and make the discarding of calendar's every year an occasion for excitement instead of humdrum domesticity.... For the last several years, I've expected a new selection of Etgar Keret stories every summer (disappointed this past summer, I might add) and if we were to add a new book of stories from this writer to the start of the dark a...more

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Oct 08, 2009 Cynthia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2009

Petrushevskaya creates a world of aloneness. Even in the presence of others there is isolation, hopelessness. Survival is the highest good for which to strive. Mental and physical weakness is evil because it can destroy the individual and their companions. The settings and happenings are fantastic or worse, just real enough to tilt into horror. ALL the characters are classic unreliable narrators OR are their perceptions rawly real? The ground is always shifting underfoot....your heart slithers a...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Benjamin rated it 5 of 5 stars

I love this book, even though I've never been too much into the use of tale and fable conceits in contemporary fiction. Petrushevskaya has me turned me around. I can't tell if she's changed my mind on the tale form, or if she's doing something sneakier under a guise of folkloric simplicity. If I had to pin it down, I'd say she's really figured out the intersection of spookily unnerving contemporary fiction, folklore, and the ghost stories we still remember and re-tell, long after we stop believi...more

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Jan 06, 2011 Cedar rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Everyone

Shelves: short-stories, russian

Again I have to say I miss the ability for a half star... I would have given this three and a half stars happily, not sure it really deserves the four...

There are some truly magical stories in this book, that are thought provoking and continue with you for days after you have read them. I have favourites, as everyone does in a collection, but each has its own merit. Its interesting to note that stories have not been selected by the author, but by the translators, who are stars within they're fi...more Again I have to say I miss the ability for a half star... I would have given this three and a half stars happily, not sure it really deserves the four...

There are some truly magical stories in this book, that are thought provoking and continue with you for days after you have read them. I have favourites, as everyone does in a collection, but each has its own merit. Its interesting to note that stories have not been selected by the author, but by the translators, who are stars within they're fields, in they're own rights.

So my review, I want to review my favourites, A New Soul is a beautiful story of love lost and love found, set against the grey dreary background, with blood soaked snow of the time. The Russia that Ludmilla gently shows the reader, through her eyes, still has a heart beat steadily moving, growing stronger, waning off. The country that is the communist iron fist of the time, is softened by one that regardless of all that, still sees the land with love.

Ms Petrushevskaya treats women with respect. The portrait, no matter how crazy, is endearing, no matter how murderous, is understood, nothing happens without reason, though the strings aren't necessarily tied till the end.

Another favourite is My Love; managing to treat the (almost) death and destruction of a marriage and family, of redemption found, even when it seams most unlikely, of the true understanding of love, albeit late.

The Black Coat, dealing with such a tender subject, is non judgemental, scary, broken.

There are so many, many good stories, hell maybe it does deserve the four stars...

I inhale russian literature, taking each bit home, into my soul, learning. Some people struggle with the tendencies of the Russian Novelists, to turn each story into an epic, Anna Karina; one of my all time favourites, Lolita, Doctor Zhivago, War and Peace, the list goes on, however should a shallow area be required for introduction to this style of writing, then this is perfect, as the short stories are really really short. However the Shades of the epic novel remain, in style, culture, grace.
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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: russian

There are two kinds of stories in Petrushevskaya's imagination:[return][return]1. Those that come from a desire to be black, surreal, spiritual, ghostly, and macabre. The desire is a very familiar thing in Russian and other European fiction, and surprising as some of these stories are, in the end it is exhausting and uninteresting. It's an old desire: it goes back to the nineteenth century, to fin-de-siecle mysticism, and to late romanticism, and so it's as if modernism and postmodernism hadn't...more

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Aug 24, 2010 Eris rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of Kafka, lovers of the macabre short story

If you enjoy the morbid short story and the general flavor of Russian writing, this is a good collection for you. The stories may seem clipped at times, terse and to the point - other times they ramble on and on about details that may seem unimportant but those are the heady stock in the soup and without them the meat and potatoes have no flavor. Many of the quirks of russian writing are present, excepting the need to produce extremely long sentences.

I would say that fans of the work of Roald D...more

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Sep 21, 2011 Marshall rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm ambivalent about this book. It's quite possibly brilliant, at least to a reader familiar enough with Russian literature and Soviet life to appreciate all the cultural and political nuances. I'm somewhere in the middle: I've read other Russian authors, enough to have a feel for what was going on, but not so familiar that I'll ever write scholarly articles on the subject. The collection started off strong, delivering the kind of stories the tantalizing synopsis promised. Then it fizzled out. D...more

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Apr 09, 2013 steffy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-books

These stories reminded me very much of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books that I loved as a kid. Not exactly scary, but with a little twist at the end that might seem... spooky.

I enjoyed most of the stories, and I enjoyed the stories themselves, my only hang up was the writing. I think it was mostly that something may have gotten "lost in translation"... strange bits thrown in to weird places, things told out of order, random facts thrown in where unnecessary, kind of sloppily written...more

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Dec 08, 2010 Venessa rated it 5 of 5 stars

I didn't always like Russian literature. I read and loved Anna Karenina the summer before my senior year in high school, but otherwise I labelled it "long and boring." Was I ever wrong. Thank you, Cherie, for opening my eyes to the Russians again, because they are anything but "long and boring." (I remember you being like "what, V, come on" in a letter way back in the day of our Early Letters, Volume I.) My fascination began with Bulgakov's magnificent Master and Margarita, and I hope that fasci...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Belinda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-story-collections, fairy-tales

I adored this book--I found it one of my favorite ways--by grazing the library--I don't like looking on computers or such at the library--I like to wander--I have my favorite sections that I make special sure to browse but I love to start at the front of a section and the browse to the end. that's how I found this book--I have never heard of the author but the title grabbed me (as it would anyone, lol). As much as I knew the book would be strange based on the title alone, I had no idea how magic...more

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Mar 30, 2010 Nicole rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: do-you-believe-in-magic

I was on the library wait list for this book for months, so there was a lot of time for anticipation to build. And it did. Which may have exacerbated the somewhat let-down feeling I have after finishing this collection.

What she does well is build an eerie, suspenseful vibe in many of her stories. Some give us a perfect horror setting, where even benign things seem sinister and we're primed to scream at whatever's about to reach out from the shadows. Also, she's good at making her darker elements...more I was on the library wait list for this book for months, so there was a lot of time for anticipation to build. And it did. Which may have exacerbated the somewhat let-down feeling I have after finishing this collection.

What she does well is build an eerie, suspenseful vibe in many of her stories. Some give us a perfect horror setting, where even benign things seem sinister and we're primed to scream at whatever's about to reach out from the shadows. Also, she's good at making her darker elements realistic: people can turn against each other and themselves in all of the ways she presents here, she just magnifies them beyond what we're likely to (or even what is possible to) encounter in real life.

But. The writing is strangely abrupt in a couple of different ways. The first is in the sentences themselves and the transitions between them. Example? Here's the opening of the first story in the collection:
"During the war, a colonel received a letter from his wife. She misses him very much, it said, and won't he come visit because she's worried she'll die without having seen him. The colonel applied for leave right away, and as it happened that just a few days earlier he'd been awarded a medal, he was granted three days. He got a plane home, but just an hour before his arrival his wife died."
Typing that out, I think it's a combination of abruptness and distance that keeps me from getting invested in these stories. These characters are so far away from me and here and now that I'm not really sure how to start caring about what happens to them. The abrupt, choppy feel could be at least in part a result of the translation, hard to tell. This does get better as the book goes on, feeling significantly smoother in the later stories than the earlier ones (though I don't think they're actually chronological--maybe I just got used to the feel of the writing).
The other way in which these stories are abrupt is in their endings. We're cruising along in fun suspense mode and then in the last paragraph there will be a ta-da!/gasp! moment (or what seems intended to be one, at least), and then the story's over. In some of the stories, we already know or suspect what that moment will be, so it's really just a character getting the revelation that we've already had and then the story ends. Just like that.

So, some good, fun elements and some frustrating ones. It's been several years since I've read Maupassant's horror stories, but this reminded me of Le Horla and a couple others of his. Similar eerie feel, similar abruptness in the prose, similar ta-da endings. Worth a read, but hard to get sucked into the story.(less)

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Aug 30, 2010 Laurie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Imagine Angela Carter’s dark, surrealistic stories are even darker than they are. Got it? Now, go even darker. Now you’ve got the tone of Petrushevskaya’s short tales. Set in Soviet era Russia, these stories explore extremes of poverty and despair. This is a world where there is never enough to eat, where if you have even a little bit you are at once a prime target for theft, where sons rob their mothers and neighbors plot murder.

These are surreal, magical tales. A number take place in that lim...more

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Dec 29, 2011 Minli rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: mythic, sirens-2012, adult

A deliciously, delightfully creepy collection of tales. I am surprised by how much I enjoyed this--I suppose it's my reward for (sort of) venturing outside my comfort zone.

All of Petrushevskaya's tales in this collection involve some twisty magic in the folkloric vein. You won't recognize them as retellings, though they contain allegorical imagery (I guess the last one suggests the Little Match Girl). I'm sure this comes out of a rich tradition of Russian tales and contemporary life, but since...more

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Mar 01, 2011 Leanna rated it 3 of 5 stars

I had high hopes for this short story collection. For one, I couldn’t resist its title: There Once was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. I also have an affinity for Eastern European literature.

Sadly, the first few stories left me disappointed. Although the author is Russian and the stories take place in Russia, I felt like I'd heard many of them before. In fact, some read like a rehash of scary stories I heard at sleepovers as a child. I also felt no spark in the...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Kim rated it 2 of 5 stars

This collection of short stories, moral tales and fairy tales mostly caught my attention because of the Russian theme. I have a particular love for Old Russian culture and this seemed like a good way to go about learning more.

Some of the stories were not that great. They simply didn't interest me and it was a bit of a chore to get through them. However, some of the stories were told masterfully, very compelling and some even gave you that 'ooOOooh!' sensation at the end of being pleasantly surpr...more

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Dec 27, 2009 peaseblossom rated it 4 of 5 stars

Even though this is a book of 'fairy tales', it's neither trite nor didactic (these are the problems I usually have with modern books of 'fairy tales'). The voice is informal but does not shrink from horrors, real and fantastic. The intro positions this as a book of 'nekyia' or Homeric 'night stories' (think Odysseus traveling to the underworld); link that to this Petrushevskaya quote I found on Wikipedia: "Russia is a land of women Homers, women who tell their stories orally, just like that, wi...more

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Dec 04, 2009 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction

Sometimes there's those meals that you just wolf down. The eating only takes minutes, but the digestion lasts hours. That is the analogy I would draw with this book. A slim book at just a tad over 200 pages, these dark stories will be read quickly, but you will find yourself deciphering meaning and decoding symbolism well after the story is done. Although many begin with "Once upon a time," these aren't your typical fairy tales. Except for Marilena's Secret there isn't even a story that you coul...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Wes rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a book of fairy tales, parables and oddities that is by turns sardonic, pained, mystical, blunt, and fanciful. The various stories collected here, even the "happy" ones are, at root, mournful. The subjects never dare to dream for much beyond not losing absolutely everything and avoiding some kind of eternal damnation. Rarely do things end tidily, instead Petrushevskaya is content to leave various threads hanging, and in the world she's created here that only makes sense. If however you'r...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Colin N. rated it 3 of 5 stars

An interesting work, "There Once Lived a Woman" consists of various tales the author wrote in the course of her career, grouped together in this collection, roughly by theme. These are ghost stories, fables, and surreal nightmares and Petrushevskaya nicely creates atmoshpheres of melancholy and sadness.

The stories offer, in a way, a glimpse into what it must have felt like to live in communist Russia. Many of the characters here are widows, or families struggling through the hardship and war th...more

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Feb 11, 2010 Erica Harmon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-by-ladies

Loved these. Read most of them, spellbound, on the T in the mornings, and the rest I read aloud with a friend. Scary stories of the supernatural are a favorite of mine, as are contemporary Russian authors, and interesting typefaces.

The element of these stories I found most chilling was not the ghosts, but instead the depiction of a Soviet Union/Russia I had never really encountered; one populated by cynical and mercenary men and women struggling to survive. Of course, that only made the glimpses...more

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Aug 28, 2012 Megan rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those who are sick in the head

Shelves: half-price, when-fools-russian, turn-the-screw, on-the-backburner, own

My rating of this would probably be more like 3 1/2 stars. I don't know if you've noticed, but the title of this compilation of Petrushevskaya's short stories is quite dark if not disturbing (on the other hand, if you're like me you read the title proceeded to chuckle and then became intrigued, wanting to know what it was all about). The title of this compilation isn't the title of one of her stories, though the story it is referring to is called "Revenge," and it's aptly named. A lot of the sto...more

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About Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya (Russian: Людмила Стефановна Петрушевская) (born 26 May 1938) is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright.

Her works include the novels The Time Night (1992) and The Number One, both short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize, and Immortal Love, a collection of short stories and monologues. Since the late 1980s her plays, stories and novels have been published in...more

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6490566-there-once-lived-a-woman-who-tried-to-kill-her-neighbor-s-baby?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348229667l/6490566.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6490566-there-once-lived-a-woman-who-tried-to-kill-her-neighbor-s-baby?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya[/url]

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

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