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

“This celebrated Russian author is so disquieting that long after Solzhenitsyn had been published in the Soviet Union, her fiction was banned—even though nothing about it screams ‘political’ or ‘dissident’ or anything else. It just screams.”

—Elle

“Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov.”

—More

“The fact that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is Russia’s premier writer of fiction today proves that the literary tradition that produced Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well.”

—Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast

“Her witchy magic foments an unsettling brew of conscience and consequences.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“What distinguishes the author is her compression of language, her use of detail, and her powerful visual sense.”

—Time Out New York

“There is no other writer who can blend the absurd and the real in such a scary, amazing, and wonderful way.”

—Lara Vapnyar, author of There Are Jews in My House

“A master of the Russian short story.”

—Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov