"One of Russia's best living writers . . . Her tales inhabit a borderline between this world and the next." -The New York Times At first glance, the stories in The New Adventures of Helen seems simple, even child-like, but a deep reading reveals satire and darkness manifested through classic fairy tale tropes characteristically upended by Petrushevskaya. These "adult fairy tales" ask deep questions about gender, love, history, memory, and the future, taking place in times between history and the now. These stories, quirky but yet inspired by a confident hopefulness, will inspire and provoke English-speaking readers across the globe.

From Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Russia's greatest living absurdist and surrealistic writer and New York Times bestseller: traditional family drama meet burlesque social satire, enveloped in a Bollywood soap-opera plot. Set in the 1980s and '90s, Kidnapped focuses on the life of Alina, a promising language student who must drop her academic career because of an unplanned pregnancy. Alina decides to give up a baby for adoption after birth and is set to leave the hospital alone. In the hospital she meets another girl, Masha, who is happily looking forward to the childbirth and speaks up of her life plans with the husband in a republic in South Asia. When Masha dies in childbirth, Alina impulsively exchanges the babies' name bracelets in an attempt to send her newborn son away from the dull reality of Soviet life. But then the unthinkable happens: Masha's husband asks Alina to falsify her identity and come with him in the foreign service. Full of twists and turns, Kidnapped results in a drama worthy of a daytime soap opera: medical deceit, identity scams, and falsified death abound. Despite it all, Alina survives against all odds in unthinkable circumstances, sure above all that she will learn to be a good mother.

New York Times Bestseller Winner of the World Fantasy Award One of New York magazine's 10 Best Books of the Year One of NPR's 5 Best Works of Foreign Fiction The celebrated scary fairy tales of Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer-the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Vanishings 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.

From the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, the masterly novellas that established her as one of the greatest living Russian writers-including a new translation of the modern classic The Time Is Night "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 (inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"), 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.

Love stories, with a twist, by Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer-the author of the prizewinning memoir about growing up in Stalinist Russia, The Girl from the Metropol Hotel By turns sly and sweet, burlesque and heartbreaking, these realist fables of women looking for love are the stories that Ludmilla Petrushevskaya-who has been compared to Chekhov, Tolstoy, Beckett, Poe, Angela Carter, and even Stephen King-is best known for in Russia. Here are attempts at human connection, both depraved and sublime, by people across the life span: one-night stands in communal apartments, poignantly awkward couplings, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, elopements, tentative courtships, and rampant infidelity, shot through with lurid violence, romantic illusion, and surprising tenderness. With the satirical eye of Cindy Sherman, Petrushevskaya blends macabre spectacle with transformative moments of grace and shows just why she is Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer.

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife's face; and a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams. In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales.