Quote: In Nazi Germany books consideredto be un-German were burnt in public. No such public ritual existed in the Soviet Union, where censorship was secretive and subtle.

During the Cold War (1945-1989), the Polish government suppressed culture behind closed doors too. The most populous central European country was then aligned to Moscow, which meant any criticism of the Kremlin was off limits.

This Sovietisation of Polish culture was resisted by certain writers, such as Czesław Miłosz, who fled to Paris in the early 1950s. The Polish poet won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, but his writing was banned in his native country. As was the work of many western writers, including George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and Virginia Woolf.

But in communist Poland an underground literary culture still flourished. Books came from the west via various channels and sources. Some were hidden in the toilets of sleeper trains shuttling across Europe. A copy of The Gulag Archipelago, by Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was said to have been concealed in a baby's nappy on a flight to Warsaw. But banned literature wasn't coming into Poland by sheer chance. "[It was] part of a decades-long US intelligence operation [that built] up libraries of illicit books on the far side of the Iron Curtain," Charlie English explains in The CIA Book Club.

The British author begins this captivating story in 1955, when Free Europe Press printed 260,000 copies of Orwell's 1945 political fable Animal Farm, which were sent by balloon into East-Central Europe. But the clandestine mission, the brainchild of Free Europe Committee (FEC), an anti-communist CIA front organisation, wasn't very successful. So Langley, CIA headquarters, came up with a more effective strategy: direct mail.

Post was strictly censored behind the Iron Curtain, but some books got through. "No country responded with greater enthusiasm than Poland," writes English, a former Guardian journalist. A persistent researcher who writes with flair, he notes that books with more controversial themes were typically sent to privileged intellectuals less likely to be persecuted. Among that list was Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the Archbishop of Krakow, later elected Pope John Paul II. The world's first Slavic Pope had been receiving books - indirectly at least - from the CIA for years. But like most of the recipients, he had no clue where the books were coming from.

The CIA book program was "a complex organisation ... consisting of bookshops, publishers, libraries, book exporters, and Russian and East European personalities" living in various European cities, as George Minden once put it. During the mid-1950s the Romanian exile began working for the Free Europe Press Book Centre in New York, which handled the CIA's mailing project.

Two decades later, Minden was president of the International Literary Centre (ILC), which controlled CIA literary influencing programs across the Eastern Bloc and in the Soviet Union. Minden's final field report in late January 1991 noted that the ILC had sent close to 10 million cultural items east of the Iron Curtain over a period of about 35 years.

Most files linked to the CIA program remain classified, but Minden's notes, made over several decades, are not, and English makes great use of them to piece together a compelling narrative that feels closer to a Cold War spy thriller than political history.

Elsewhere, English quotes from dozens of interviews with a colourful cohort of intellectuals, journalists, editors and dissidents, all of whom were directly affected by the program, including Adam Michnik. The Polish writer had been a leading adviser to Poland's Solidarity trade union, one of the most influential workers' movements in postwar Europe. After martial law was introduced in 1981, Michnik became one of Poland's most famous political prisoners and was eventually freed in August 1986.

English makes a convincing argument that Poland's arduous path to intellectual freedom, and to democracy, are inextricably linked. Michnik was front and centre of that struggle. In May 1989, he co-founded Poland's first independent daily newspaper, Election Gazette.

That November, the Berlin Wall fell. But it's worth remembering that it was Poland - not Germany - that was the first domino to fall inside the Eastern Bloc. A monumental turning point came on June 5, 1989, when the Solidarity movement achieved a major victory in Poland, in what turned out to be the most significant election there since before the Second World War.

The final word goes to Michnik, who subtly suggests that literature played a significant role in ending the Cold War.

"A book is like a reservoir of freedom, of independent thought, a reservoir of human dignity," Michnik says. "We should build a monument to books."

The CIA were no doubt very pleased. But they kept schtum.

   

Quote: Ocean Vuong achieved fame as a poet before his acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and there's creative continuity in follow-up The Emperor of Gladness. Previously examined motifs undergo complex transformations so that it reads like the literary equivalent of a musical variation.

Autobiography is grist to the mill for Vuong. His mother fled Saigon for the US when he was an infant. He was raised in Connecticut among an extended family of Vietnamese refugees. He's also openly gay. These experiences inspire but do not define his creative fiction, and if the vaunted lyricism of a particular style of American dreaming marks the opening of The Emperor of Gladness - a flashy choric invocation of a dead-end Connecticut town, its ghosts inviting suicidal 19-year old Hai to escape by jumping off a bridge - it isn't long before sublime cadence and melancholy grandeur yield to a different kind of song.

An old woman spies the boy in the rain, and roundly tells him: "You can't die in front of my house, okay?" This is Grazina - a force to be reckoned with, having survived Hitler and Stalin in Lithuania during World War II, and now in a battle to preserve her independence against the onset of dementia. Hai moves in as an unofficial carer, to keep her out of a nursing home.

Grim doesn't begin to cover their living conditions; the house is decrepit and built on a toxic contamination site and Grazina can't afford to feed them. So Hai lands a job (courtesy of his cousin Sony, named after the television manufacturer) at a budget restaurant chain.

As Hai's friendship with Grazina grows, he bathes her, comforts her when decades-old war trauma resurfaces, and engages in role-playing historical battles with her to manage her sundowning. He reads Slaughterhouse-Five and The Brothers Karamazov from her dead husband's library and, alas, stumbles across an unused bottle of serious painkillers ... dire news for someone recovering from opioid addiction.

At work, Hai rocks up to every shift pinned to cope with the drudgery. Genuine camaraderie and unlikely dignity are found among the motley crew there, despite some extreme weirdness. Long-serving Maureen evades grief in conspiracist thinking - she believes lizard men control the world, she speaks like a drag queen, and she harbours a Star Wars obsession. Manager BJ conducts herself with an almost martial pride - giving inspirational speeches, slipping cake mix into the cornbread, and training to achieve her dream of making it on the commercial wrestling stage.

Dreams are thwarted in this place - except perhaps for Sony; his unaffected desires, whether in crafting origami penguins or in his encyclopedic knowledge of the American Civil War, throw into sharp relief the miseries inflicted on other characters by unattainable ones.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was composed through a series of letters to someone who can't read. This novel might just be a novel composed to give voice to a
writer who cannot write. Hai's addiction and incapacity stem from two sources: the peculiar pressure on a refugee child to rise from the ashes of their parents' trauma, and the tragedy of losing a first love to suicide.

Does the novel stray into misery *****? Vuong does lay bare the abjectness of conditions facing the lower working class, not to mention the lumpenproletariat, in the bleakest imaginable manner. Grazina winds up in a nursing home, after her bourgeois son intervenes with brittle pieties and outrage. And Hai himself doesn't feel at home until he's literally thrown himself into a dumpster, which is a hell of a way to end a novel.

But Vuong is too blazingly sincere a writer for heavy-handedness to overshadow the book's virtues. From overheard dialogue to subversive set-pieces repeating the tragedies of US history as farce, the novel explores what the have-nots do have in contemporary America, and if its seriousness can lead to moments of unintentional
camp, well, as Susan Sontag noted, that's the highest form of it.