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Spotlight: There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (giveaway)
There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In – Three Novellas About Family
written by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
published by Penguin Books
find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Goodreads
About the book – from Goodreads: The masterly novellas that established Ludmilla Petrushevskaya as one of the greatest living Russian writers.
“Love them, they’ll torture you; don’t love them, they’ll leave you anyway.”
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
“An important writer . . . Russia’s best-known . . . She’s a much better storyteller than her American counterparts in the seedy surreal. . . . Petrushevskaya’s stories should remind her readers of our own follies, illusions and tenderness.” —Chicago Tribune
“Her suspenseful writing calls to mind the creepiness of Poe and the psychological acuity (and sly irony) of Chekhov.” —More
“[Petrushevskaya] is hailed as one of Russia’s best living writers. This slim volume shows why. Again and again, in surprisingly few words, her witchy magic foments an unsettling brew of conscience and consequences.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Petrushevskaya’s short stories—which use fairy tale imagery and allegory to comment on Russia’s Soviet past and corrupt present—combine Gogol’s depth of absurdity and Shirley Jackson paranoia, to disturbing effect…The rise of the tightly constructed ‘weird’ tales of Petrushevskaya, Victor Pelevin and Tatyana Tolstaya suggests a secure Soviet literary future.” —NPR.org
“Anything but dull, the stories twist and peak in odd places. They create nooks in which the reader can sit and think: What does this mean?” —Los Angeles Times
