The Letter Killers Club
  • Published: 15 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9781590174500
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $34.99

The Letter Killers Club

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A New York Review Books Original

The Letter Killers Club is a secret society of self-described “conceivers” who, to preserve the purity of their conceptions, will commit nothing to paper. (What, after all, is your run-of-the-mill scribbler of stories if not an accomplished corruptor of conceptions?) The logic of the club is strict and uncompromising. Every Saturday, members meet in a firelit room filled with empty black bookshelves where they strive to top one another by developing ever unlikelier, ever more perfect conceptions: a rehearsal of Hamlet hijacked by an actor who vanishes with the role; the double life of a merry medieval cleric derailed by a costume change; a machine-run world that imprisons men’s minds while conscripting their bodies; a dead Roman scribe stranded this side of the River Acheron. But in this book set in an ominous Soviet Moscow of the 1920s, the members of the club are strangely mistrustful of one another, while all are under the spell of its despotic President, and there is no telling, in the end, just how lethal the purely conceptual—or, for that matter, letters—may be.
  • Published: 15 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9781590174500
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 144
  • RRP: $34.99
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About the author

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887—1950) was an ethnically Polish Ukrainian-born short-story writer whose work was largely unpublished, though he was active among Moscow’s literati in the 1920s. He died in Moscow but his burial site is unknown.

Joanne Turnbull has translated a number of books from Russian, including Andrei Sinyavsky’s Soviet Civilization and Ivan the Fool, Asar Eppel’s The Grassy Street, and Andrei Sergeyev’s Stamp Album. She lives in Moscow.

Also by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Unwitting Street
The Return of Munchausen
Autobiography of a Corpse
Memories Of The Future
See all

Praise for The Letter Killers Club

  • "A Russian writer whose morbidly satiric imagination forms the wild (missing) link between the futuristic dream tales of Edgar Allan Poe and the postwar scientific nightmares of Stanislaw Lem... an impish master of the fatalistically fantastic." --Bill Marx, The World
  • "Neologistic whimsy, feverish invention and existential angst." --The New York Times Book Review
  • "For anyone enthralled by the satirical avant-garde that briefly shone on the fringes of Soviet culture in the 1920s, here's a revelation." --The Independent
  • "Krzhizhanovsky is often compared to Borges, Swift, Poe, Gogol, Kafka, and Beckett, yet his fiction relies on its own special mixture of heresy and logic...phantasmagoric..." --Natasha Randall, Bookforum
  • "Curiously, one of the most startling qualities of his work is the directness with which it addresses our 21st century concerns. It's as if the Soviet editors were right: Krzhizhanovsky now seems more our contemporary than theirs...His stories, like those of Jorge Luis Borges, are closer to poetry and philosophy than to the realistic novel...It is now clear that Krzhizhanovsky is one of the greatest Russian writers of the last century." -Robert Chandler, Financial Times

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