Annotation: Never have the 1990s and 2000s been described with such fidelity as they are in Alla Gorbunova’s new book. Children, students, indigents, young poets – her heroines and heroes live life intensely, balancing between angst and euphoria, sanctity and decay, thrown from the fires of domestic madness into the flames of informal and precarious life in St. Petersburg. Yet Gorbunova’s stories are far from slice-of-life writing: she looks on these fragile and dangerous realities with uncompromising tenderness, distinguishing within them realities experiences that are capable of transforming her heroines and heroes.