from jasonlf

I wanted to like this more than I actually did like it. Some of the stories are quite striking, original and memorable. But there is something overly defiant of any internal logic or coherence that gets in the way of them being fully satisfying. And there was a certain repetitiveness to them. Tha...

from -sunny-

This was interesting to read so soon after reading "Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology," since this collection's stories would have been right at home in that volume. "Slipstream," to anyone not familiar with the term, isn't the most readily defined of genres, but it generally describ...

from -sunny-

This was interesting to read so soon after reading "Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology," since this collection's stories would have been right at home in that volume. "Slipstream," to anyone not familiar with the term, isn't the most readily defined of genres, but it generally describ...

from JimElkins

There are two kinds of stories in Petrushevskaya's imagination: 1. Those that come from a desire to be black, surreal, spiritual, ghostly, and macabre. The desire is a very familiar thing in Russian and other European fiction, and surprising as some of these stories are, in the end it is exhausti...

from Y2Ash

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby was good but I liked her previous and equally tongue-tying title about a woman's sister's husband who hanged himself. I feel with this novel either I didn't get the symbolism, something got lost in translatio...