Alla Gorbunova’s prose is deeply authentic, and speaks to all sorts of readers—from authoritative literary critics, artists, and philosophers, to college and high school students. This book is no exception. Hilarious, sad, poignant, and occasionally frightening, these wonderfully lively tales are shot through with the light of her soul, the light of “another matter.”

Lyrical sketches that are profound rather than long—with something in them of medieval exempla, the Japanese zuihitsu, and the comic anecdote, in which everything is just fine, except when it isn’t. Many of these tales are as paradoxical as their heroine, who re- mains somehow at a distance from everyday life while being in the middle of it all. As she herself admits, over half of her consciousness is an inferno of anxiety and terror, while the rest is in a primeval paradise wherein where evil is impossible.

— Ksenia Buksha