The New Adventures of Helen

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya was born in 1938 in Moscow, where she still lives. She is the author of more than fifteen collections of prose, including the New York Times-bestseller There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales (2009), which won a World Fantasy Award and was one of New York Magazine's Ten Best Books of the Year and one of NPR's Five Best Works of Foreign Fiction, and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories (2013). A singular force in modern Russian fiction, she is also a playwright whose work has been staged by leading theater companies all over the world. In 2002 she received Russia's most prestigious prize, the Triumph, for lifetime achievement.

"We are likely to hear a lot more of this woman. Some October, perhaps, from the Nobel Prize committee." -The Nation

"One of Russia's best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next." -The New York Times Book Review

"Petrushevskaya, now seventy-six and finally attracting the readership she deserves, [has] a ringleader's calm mastery of the absurd." -The New Yorker

"Petrushevskaya writes instant classics." -The Daily Beast

"Petrushevskaya is the Tolstoy of the communal kitchen. . . . She is not, like Tolstoy, writing of war, or, like Dostoevsky, writing of criminals on the street, or, like poet Anna Akhmatova or novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, noting the extreme suffering of those sent to the camps. Rather, she is bearing witness to the fight to survive the everyday. . . . [She is] dazzlingly talented and deeply empathetic." -Slate

"This celebrated Russian author is so disquieting that long after Solzhenitsyn had been published in the Soviet Union, her fiction was banned-even though nothing about it screams 'political' or 'dissident' or anything else. It just screams." -Elle

"Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov." -More

"Petrushevskaya's fiction [offers] a glimpse of what it means to be a human being, living sometimes in bitter misery, sometimes in unexpected grace." -Jenny Offill, The New York Times Book Review

"The fact that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is Russia's premier writer of fiction today proves that the literary tradition that produced Dostoyevsky, Gogol, and Babel is alive and well." -Taylor Antrim, The Daily Beast

"What distinguishes the author is her compression of language, her use of detail and her powerful visual sense." -