There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In Three Novellas About Family

The masterly novellas that established Ludmilla Petrushevskaya as one of the greatest living Russian writers—including a new translation of the modern classic The Time Is Night

“Love them,­ they’ll torture you; don’t love them, ­they’ll leave you anyway.”

After her work was suppressed for many years, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya won wide recognition for capturing the experiences of everyday Russians with profound pathos and mordant wit. Among her most famous and controversial works, these three novellas—The Time Is Night, Chocolates with Liqueur (inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”), and Among Friends—are modern classics that breathe new life into Tolstoy’s famous dictum, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Together they confirm the genius of an author with a gift for turning adversity into art.

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has published stories in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and n + 1. Born in 1938, she is one of Russia's most celebrated contemporary authors. She lives in Moscow.   Anna Summers (translator/introducer) is the coeditor and co-translator of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby and the editor and translator of There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself. Born in Moscow, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.