The Gambler

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1821–1881 · Russia

Originally Igrok (Russian)

Why it matters

Dictated in under a month to a stenographer to outrun a punishing contract deadline, Dostoevsky's own roulette addiction becomes a young tutor's spiral at the wheel in a German spa town. The compulsion that nearly ruined its author supplies fiction's sharpest study of addiction as its own kind of faith.

At a glance

Short and fast-moving, though its narrator's obsessive spiraling logic takes some patience.