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The latest addition to our Reviews Section is by Brendan Riley on There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, from Penguin.

Brendan has written reviews for Three Percent in the past, and has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. Brendan’s translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes.

Petrushevskaya’s published in English, There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor���Ĵ�ý�s Baby (Penguin Books), came out in 2009 and was on NPR’s/Jessa Crispin’s . Here’s a bit of Brendan’s review:

This slender, uncanny volume���Ĵ�ý�the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.���Ĵ�ý�has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are grouped into four sections: ���Ĵ�ý�A Murky Fate���Ĵ�ý�; ���Ĵ�ý�Hallelujah, Family!���Ĵ�ý�; ���Ĵ�ý�My Little One���Ĵ�ý�; and ���Ĵ�ý�A Happy Ending.���Ĵ�ý� But there is little in them that readers might associate with true love or happy endings. Instead, Petrushevskaya delivers a smoking, cast-iron skillet upside the head: promiscuity, serial mendacity, domestic violence, dangerous liaisons, ineptitude, ignorance, geriatric romance, and cringing fear. Love stories? Seamy debacles. Hookup sagas set in a grim Moscow and environs. Coupling stories fraught with meanness, misery, and egregious misunderstanding. Workaday women sharing sour, collective apartments and tawdry, loveless lives. Young women who flower, suffer abuse, and wither. Collision stories: hapless women, old before their time, thwarted by brutal men. Though the men hardly fare better.

In ���Ĵ�ý�A Murky Fate,���Ĵ�ý� an unmarried thirty-something living with her mother engineers a drab tryst with a man who services her with perfunctory courtesy and patronizing affection. But in her sterile office-life world, this confers a blissful memory: ���Ĵ�ý�There was nothing but pain in store for her, yet she cried with happiness and couldn���Ĵ�ý�t stop.���Ĵ�ý�

���Ĵ�ý�The Fall���Ĵ�ý� offers a dry comedy of manners at a state-run seaside resort where vacationers escaping the rainy north come together only to multiply one another���Ĵ�ý�s misery. A gaudy temptress attracts a mooning pack of suitors before efficiently selecting her tall, confident ���Ĵ�ý�Number One.���Ĵ�ý� They find the sex lovelorn travelers yearn for, only to fall prisoner to their coveted exclusion and inevitable teary separation: ���Ĵ�ý�Our golden couple has departed. The delicate Carmen and her faithful husband, Number One, are jetting through the frozen air away from each other, back to their children and spouses, back to the cold, and to hard, grim work.���Ĵ�ý�

For the rest of the review, go here.