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There Once Lived A Woman Who Killed Her Neighbors’ Baby
The selection of mystical short stories
Rights sold to:
Penguin (US)
Penguin Classics (UK)
Berlin Verlag paperback (Germany)
Christian Bourgois (France)
Atalanta (Spain)
Einaudi Stile Libero (Italy)
Relogio d'Agua (Portugal)
Cappelen Damm (Norway)
Forlaget Vandkunsten (Denmark)
Shanghai 99 Culture Consulting (Chinese simplified characters)
Meteor Press (Romania)
Tänapäev (Estonia)
Derin Kitap (Turkey)
Kawade Shobo Shinsha (Japan)
Awards:
The World Fantasy Award 2010 |
Prizes and awards:
The World Fantasy Award 2010
English translation available
#34 in NY Times bestsellers list, #15 in Amazon.com in translated fiction and #5 last week in The Strand
Synopsys
A master of the short story genre, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya dazzles the imagination with explorations of death, love, space, time and identity.
In her magical-realistic stories that at once recall Kafka, Borges and Gogol, Petrushevskaya pictures the deprived and desperate - orphans, childless women, lonely elderly people - in search of love and happiness, in their struggle for life.
The fantastic (magical transformations, resurrection of the dead, living dolls and magical objects) merges here into reality, authentically captured by the author. Petrushevskaya’s signature prose, harrowing and painfully sensitive, seems to strip off your skin, making your naked nerves shudder at the touch of this fictional reality that is much too close for comfort.
Here is a childless woman who grows a girl in a cabbage, or a girl attempts suicide and finds herself in a horrid, unlit apartment building chased by monstrous lorry drivers, escaping a split second before it is too late to come back to life. Set against a bleak background, Petrushevskaya’s “fairy-tales for grownups”, as the author defines the genre, are amazingly dynamic and ingenious.
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