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  • Published: 6 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781590175231
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

The Letter Killers Club





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: 6 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781590175231
  • Imprint: RH US eBook Adult
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 144

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Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887—1950) was an ethnically Polish Ukrainian-born short-story writer whose work was largely unpublished, though he was active among Moscow’s literati in the 1920s.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

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