Books like The letter killers club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskiĭ

Set against the backdrop of 1920s Soviet Moscow, the Letter Killers Club is a secret society of writers who reject the conventional practice of recording their ideas. Each Saturday, the members meet in a dim, fire‑lit room lined with empty bookshelves to present and discuss their ‘pure and unsubstantiated’ conceptions. Their sessions feature a range of imagined scenarios—from a Hamlet rehearsal disrupted by an actor who vanishes, to a medieval cleric’s double life derailed by a costume change, to a machine‑run world that confines human minds while conscripting bodies, and even a dead Roman scribe stranded beyond the River Acheron. The group’s structure mirrors the paranoia of the era: highly mistrustful of one another yet entranced by a despotic president. The story offers a philosophical meditation on madness, silence, and the untamed power of the word.

First publish date: 2011