She’s a tall, grown-up, married woman now, but she was once an orphan living with her grandmother, who had taken her in when the girl’s mother disappeared. That happens sometimes — a person will just disappear. Such strange sentences. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, a collection of Russian fairy tales, is full of stories that are full of such sentences and characters half in the real world. I’d read “The Fountain House” in The New Yorker, but bought this book without realizing that story was in here. My favorite was “There’s Someone In the House,” which starts, “There is clearly someone in the house.” So, so weird, that kind of flat and declarative statement.