"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.