Read Dead Souls

A St Petersburg copying clerk saves for months for a new coat and is robbed of it on the first night he wears it.

A 999-line poem and the mad commentary of the man who stole it; Nabokov's puzzle novel.

Dostoevsky's tense moral descent of a guilty student (1866).

The timeless falling-blocks puzzle (1984).

Tolstoy's epic of Russia in the Napoleonic age (1869).

Bulgakov's satirical devil-in-Moscow masterpiece (1967).

A lawyer follows a clockwork trail to a lost island of mammoths; Benoit Sokal's art.

Zamyatin's 1921 glass city of numbers; the book Orwell and Huxley both borrowed from.