Людмила Стефановна Петрушевская

"The prizewinning memoir of one of the world's great writers, about coming of age and finding her voice amid the hardships of Stalinist Russia. Like a young Edith Piaf, wandering the streets singing for alms, and like Oliver Twist, living by his wits, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up watchful and hungry, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation, made more acute by the awareness that her family of Bolshevik intellectuals, now reduced to waiting in bread lines, once lived large across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing--of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the kitchen tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food--we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the more than two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged"--

Over the last several decades, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been one of the most admired and acclaimed contemporary writers at work in Russia, and beginning in the late 1980s her plays and stories have been published in Italian, German, and French to far-ranging recognition and acclaim. Now, with The Time: Night, American readers are finally introduced to this remarkable writer. "Russia is a land of women Homers," Petrushevskaya has said, and it is this informal narrative tradition of ordinary Russian women which gives shape to this novel. It comes to life in the voice of Anna Andrianovna, a woman well past middle age struggling to earn even a bare living as a poet, scribbling notes in the solitary, desolate, yet consoling hours of the night. Anna is beset with a seemingly impossible burden: to find space, money, time, food, and love for her family - for her hopeless son, Andrei, newly released from a labor camp; for her daughter, Alyona ("my permanent heartache"), whose diary of loveless affairs forms a darkly hilarious counterpoint to Anna's narrative; for Alyona's children, each the hapless result of a different doomed encounter; and for Anna's own senile, psychotic mother. Here, within the sharp focus of a novel whose compression is balanced by its emotional intensity and acutely evocative physical detail, are four generations of mothers and children, each struggling for their own version of life, each caught in wounding and inescapable patterns of love, hate, pity, and cruelty. The result is a revelation of modern Russian life and of the tempests by which families - Russian and otherwise - are inextricably bound.

315 pages ; 20 cm

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

316 pages ; 20 cm

"The masterly novellas that established Ludmilla Petrushevskaya as one of the greatest living Russian writers . 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, 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"--