Books by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
“In The Dead Mountaineer’s Inn, they are playing with the genre and breaking its rules. It’s a locked-room mystery with a large cast of characters who become trapped at a ski lodge in winter. Everyone is acting very strange. And this guy, a detective character, is trying to figure out what is going on. This novel plays with the absurdity of mystery novels. Because there is an inherent ridiculousness to the typical Agatha Christie novel, which is to say: all of these details are clues, and they are supposed to add up to something.” Read more...
Nicholas Russell, Novelist
“Roadside Picnic is the single greatest work of sci-fi fiction, written by these two scientist brothers. Roadside Picnic is, among other things, a wonderful indirect metaphorical reflection on everything about Soviet Russia – from its terrible scrappy industrial texture, through to the way that the possibility of miracles kept bobbing on through the wasteland like will-o’-the-wisps. It’s about the way that industrial grime and decay always coincided with promises that at any moment things could be radiantly wonderful.” Read more...
The best books on 20th Century Russia
Francis Spufford, Historian
Interviews where books by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were recommended
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1
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy -
2
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler -
3
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky -
4
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
by Vladimir Nabokov -
5
A Hero of Our Time
by Mikhail Lermontov & translator Vladimir Nabokov -
6
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
by Nikolai Leskov
Books by Russian Authors
Books by Russian Authors
From the Enlightenment onwards, Russian authors have produced a vast and influential literary canon, including historic epics, absurdist classics, and tortured reflections on the human condition. Russia’s political turmoil also led to the writing of many moving memoirs and political works that sought to find solutions in spite of censorship and, for some authors, exile.
The best books on 20th Century Russia, recommended by Francis Spufford
Reading about Russia’s 20th century is like finding another vision of how the world might have been. Francis Spufford, author of Red Plenty, recommends books that tell the story of Russia in the last century — from Soviet science fiction set in capitalist wastelands to Khrushchev as raconteur.
Literary Mystery Novels, recommended by Nicholas Russell
Suspense is a powerful narrative engine that drives the plots of many novels, whether or not they are shelved under ‘mystery books’ in a shop. We asked Nicholas Russell – longtime bookseller and debut novelist – to recommend five of the best literary mystery novels, all notable for the quality of the writing and the creativity of approach.
