She is a winner of the NOS and Debut awards, as well as the Andrei Bely Prize. Alla Gorbunova's prose is utterly authentic and attracts a wide range of readers, from renowned literary critics, artists, and philosophers to college and high school students. This book is no exception. Funny, sad, touching, and sometimes terrifying, yet surprisingly vivid, these stories are imbued with the light of her soul, the light of ‘another matter.’ ‘Small but profound lyrical sketches—akin to medieval exempla, zuihitsu, and the genre of anecdotes, in which everything is so, yet not so. Many of them are paradoxical, like the heroine herself—in some ways far removed from everyday life, she finds herself in the very thick of it.