Yelena Furman reviews the new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevkaya

In the fall of 2021, Deep Vellum Press brought out a new translation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s stories, her collection The New Adventures of Helen, in translation by Jane Bugaeva. Our own Yelena Furman reviewed this translation for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

This collection gathers Petrushevskaya’s fairy tales for adults, published under one cover in Russian in 1997; some other selections from that Russian volume have previously appeared in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. To be sure, there are still plenty of human vices in these pages. But instead of a world in which degradation reigns supreme, here goodness prevails, aided by a large dose of magic.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-realm-of-forgotten-things-on-ludmilla-petrushevskayas-the-new-adventures-of-helen/

Read the full review at LARB, and buy the book–the best way to support an innovative publisher!

We love and admire Petrushevskaya’s writing and would love to have more responses to her work on our blog. Feel free to pitch us your reviews, and formal or creative essay ideas at puncturedlines [at] gmail.com.

Books for Review

Punctured Lines is looking for reviews of the following recent titles. Reviewers should have some expertise in terms of their chosen work, engaging substantively with its themes and techniques and bringing in direct citation to back up claims. If you are interested in reviewing a work not on the list but that fits our overall themes of feminism, LGBT, diaspora, etc., please let us know. Thank you, and we look forward to working with you.

Fiction:

Alina Adams, The Nesting Dolls (Harper, 2020)***

Nina Berberova, The Last and the First, translated by Marian Schwarz (Pushkin Press, 2021)

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