Browser reviews: Life in the gulag and books to read before you die

Kolyma Stories

Varlam Shalamov
NYRB Classics, £14.99
There is pleasure and perturbation in this huge collection. Shalamov's writing has a light, clear-eyed quality, even if the subject is the inhumane futility of life in the Soviet gulag.

Shalamov spent 15 years in forced labour camps for "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities" – six years as a slave in the gold mines of Kolyma, the remainder of his time as a prison camp paramedic. He began writing these stories after Stalin's death in 1953 and even though each is usually just a few pages in length, they capture the sheer drudgery of his existence in Kolyma – one of the coldest and most inhospitable places on earth – while also finding truth in the human spirit that survives such man-made horrors. This is plain writing portraying the cold, misery and desperation in one of Stalin's gulags and its biographical detail gives it a power that will stay with me until the publication of a second volume later this year. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. We will learn from his words. NJ McGarrigle

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die

James Mustich
Workman, £26.99
The selection stretches from Aeschylus to Émile Zola and chronologically from The Epic of Gilgemesh (Babylon, 4,000 years ago) to Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology (2017). Roughly half the books are fiction and half non-fiction and three or four paragraphs describe each title. James Mustich follows an alphabetical order, which makes the book easier to navigate but also throws up some interesting and intriguing groupings, as his selection encompasses "revered classics and commercial favourites, flights of escapist entertainment and enlightening works of erudition". Many and varied illustrations greatly enhance the overall effect. The choice is inevitably subjective, the product of the editor's tastes. Quibbles might be an Anglo-American bias and some of the options; isn't HG Wells's The Time Machine (not included) superior to The Invisible Man (included) and WG Sebald's Austerlitz (not included) better than The Emigrants (included)? The entry for each work has endnotes and suggested further reading, which makes the whole an extraordinary achievement and "a browser's version of paradise". Brian Maye

Luisne an Chleite, a Kildare Collective

By Wordsmiths Writers Group
Kildare County Council Library & Arts Service
The title of this beautifully produced anthology translates to inspiration of the quill, an evocative invitation to lean in to this affecting treasury of creativity. With a foreword from Mae Leonard, in which she describes the contents as "an absolute delight in the eye of the beholder", the offerings in Luisne An Chleite are a revelation of poetry, prose, paintings and drawings from the Wordsmiths Group, a collective of artists and writers living in Kildare. There are several Irish language pieces, including an introduction from Ré Ó Laighléis. Interspersed with sketches from Mary Gibson, the book also features work from author and artist, Lynn Buckle. Such diverse writings evoke not just a sense of place, but also a miscellany of insightful perspectives on life, love, memory and nature. Caroline E Farrell