Will I love There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby?

Doesn’t the title say it all?

This collection of slim, clever, bleak, surprising short stories is as scary as it is fantastic. It’s a wonderful read. Plus, if you’re at all interested in Russian history, Petrushevskaya is an extraordinary recorder of Soviet and Russian life. Through her fiction—which was often censored by the Soviet government—she tells the truth about the world around her.

Isn’t that exactly what we look to stories to do?

This collection is often compared to Angela Carter, and the subject matter is superficially similar (adopting European folklore and fairytales to address contemporary issues), yet the style is quite different— Petrushevskaya's writing is sparse rather than florid and her tone bleakly emotive as opposed to ironic.

Settings merge the dark forests and woodcutter's huts of folklore with rundown high-rises and derelict train stations to illustrate the severe conditions the author was then witnessing in the Soviet Union, with magic and fantastical scenarios acting as a contrast to the poverty and suffering.

However, these fairytales are not as grim as they… show more.