
As I Lay Dying
Addie Bundren dies and her family hauls the coffin across Mississippi through flood and fire. Fifteen voices tell it, and you laugh at people whose misery you can feel.

Addie Bundren dies and her family hauls the coffin across Mississippi through flood and fire. Fifteen voices tell it, and you laugh at people whose misery you can feel.

Workers dig a foundation for the building that will house the whole proletariat, and the pit keeps widening. Platonov's Russian buckles under its own slogans, and the Soviets suppressed the book until 1987.

Two friends split the world between them: Narcissus stays in the monastery with logic and God, and Goldmund walks out into women, wandering, and the Black Death, then carves it all in wood.

Hergé sent his boy reporter into a Soviet Union he had never visited, cribbed from one anti-Bolshevik tract of rigged elections and staged factories. Crude work, and the series it opened conquered Europe.