It is 1958, and in a Moscow dorm, a young writer is woken by the sound of voices on the radio, angrily denouncing Doctor Zhivago, which had just earned Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize. A few days earlier, the young writer found a copy of this book—could those simple pages really be so dangerous? Looking back on his own early life, Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail Kadare offers this dark satire of his time as a student at the Gorky Institute for World Literature, a soulless academy set up to produce a new generation of Socialist writers.