"A mesmerizing study of books by despots great and small, from the familiar to the largely unknown."-The Washington PostA darkly humorous tour of "dictator literature" in the twentieth century, featuring the soul-killing prose and poetry of Hitler, Mao, and many more, which shows how books have sometimes shaped the world for the worseSince the days of the Roman Empire dictators have written books. But in the twentieth-century despots enjoyed unprecedented print runs to (literally) captive audiences. The titans of the genre-Stalin, Mussolini, and Khomeini among them-produced theoretical works, spiritual manifestos, poetry, memoirs, and even the occasional romance novel and established a literary tradition of boundless tedium that continues to this day.How did the production of literature become central to the running of regimes? What do these books reveal about the dictatorial soul? And how can books and literacy, most often viewed as inherently positive, cause immense and lasting harm? Putting daunting research to revelatory use, Daniel Kalder asks and brilliantly answers these questions. Marshalled upon the beleaguered shelves of The Infernal Library are the books and commissioned works of the century's most notorious figures. Their words led to the deaths of millions. Their conviction in the significance of their own thoughts brooked no argument. It is perhaps no wonder then, as Kalder argues, that many dictators began their careers as writers.

Introduction: Tradition and the Individual Tyrant Phase I: The Dictator's Canon 1. Lenin2. Stalin3. Mussolini4. Hitler5. Mao Phase II: Tyranny and Mutation 1. Small Demons2. Catholic Action3. Disembraining Machines4. Eastern Approaches5. Dead Letters6. Another Green World Phase III: Dissolution and Madness 1. Midnight in the Garden of Ultraboredom2. North Korea: The Metafictions of Kim Jong-il3. Cuba: Castro's Maximum Verbiage4. Iraq: The Historical Romances of Saddam Hussein5. Post-Soviet: Comrade Zoroaster6. Turkmenistan: Post-everything Phase IV: Death Is Not the End ConclusionSelected BibliographyIndex