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

The literary event of Halloween: a book of otherworldly power from Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer 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 is the award-winning author of more than fifteen collections of prose. The progenitor of the -ôwomen-'s fiction-ö movement in Russian letters, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world.

Keith Gessen is the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men and co-editor and founder of the literary magazine n+1. His translation of Voices from Chernobyl won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 2005.

Anna Summers holds a doctorate in Slavic literature from Harvard.