Books like The Overcoat
A lowly clerk in St. Petersburg has his overcoat stolen, and the bureaucracy's indifference to his suffering turns a comic story into a ghost story and a scream of protest.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Overcoat
Dead Souls
A swindler travels through provincial Russia buying up the ownership papers of dead serfs, and the scheme exposes the absurdity and corruption of the entire system.
Heart of a Dog
A stray dog in 1920s Moscow is surgically transformed into a human, and the resulting creature becomes a savage satire of the New Soviet Man.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
A successful judge confronted by his own mortality realises that his entire life has been a lie, and the novella's forty pages contain a complete philosophy of dying.
The Cherry Orchard
An aristocratic family's estate is sold to a merchant, and the cherry orchard they can't save becomes a symbol of everything that changes when a social order dies.
The Time Regulation Institute
Hayri İrdal, a man of no particular ability, tells how he came to help run an institute devoted to setting all the clocks of Istanbul to the same time.
Miguel Street
Linked stories of the eccentrics of a Port of Spain street in the 1940s, seen by a boy growing up among them.
The Magic Barrel
Stories of poor Jews in New York and of Americans in Italy, among them the title story of a rabbinical student and the marriage broker who finds him a bride.
Miss Lonelyhearts
A male newspaper columnist who answers desperate letters as Miss Lonelyhearts in Depression-era New York takes his readers' suffering to heart, while his cynical editor mocks his growing religious crisis.
English, August
Agastya Sen, a young Indian civil servant raised on Western books and marijuana, is posted to a small, sweltering provincial town for a year's training, and does as little as he can.
The Gentleman from San Francisco
A rich American of fifty-eight, who has worked all his life to enjoy himself, sails for the Old World with his wife and daughter on a luxury liner and arrives on Capri.
A Country Doctor's Notebook
Stories drawn from Bulgakov's year as a newly qualified doctor at a remote country hospital, where he faces amputations, difficult births and blizzards with only his textbooks, and finds the diary of a colleague who fell into morphine addiction.
A Christmas Carol
On Christmas Eve Ebenezer Scrooge, a miser who keeps his clerk working in the cold, is visited by the ghost of his dead partner, who warns him that three more spirits will come.