Ludmilla P!

 That is Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. I took to calling her Ludmilla P because my Hoosier tongue got knotted trying to find a sensible pronunciation.

Not heard of her? She is a writer. Russian, of course. 

Having read of her, I got a copy of into prison through the inter-library loan program of her short story collection, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales.

I loved the stories. Seriously, I have never read anything quite like them - and they avoid genre classification. Terror and horror are in most of them. 

Kat Solomon in her Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Scary Fairy Tales on Ploughshares may be right about scary fairy tales. Ms. Solomon dissects three stories, and if she and I cannot convince you to read Ludmilla, then do not call yourself a reader - or a writer. Yes, if you are a writer, I suggest you give her a look; I know of no one who writes so crisply about a hostile world. We could learn from her. This is from the essay:

In English, Petrushevskaya’s best-known stories have appeared in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, selected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (2009), and There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories, selected and translated by Anna Summers (2013). The first volume became a bestseller when it appeared—these “scary fairy tales” have perhaps resonated with English speakers because they tend toward allegory, relying less on an understanding of the context of late-Soviet life than most of Petrushevskaya’s more realist stories. The scary fairy tales in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, like all fairy tales, tap into the unconscious fears we have about family relations—particularly the relationship between parents and children. In these stories, mothers often struggle to protect their children against the malice and indifference of a harsh reality. Only sometimes are they successful.

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