'There once lived a woman who was so fat, she couldn't fit in a taxi, and when going into the subway she took up the whole width of the escalator' Ludmilla Petrushevskaya has been acclaimed as one of Russia's greatest living writers. These five dreamlike and blackly comic stories, two of which are here in English for the first time, tell of lost children, midnight forests, strange transformations, cruel curses, grief and resilience, in the darkest of modern fairy tales.