"Down at the base, the dome of the endless sky is its own prison. To look up at it is to see just how far away from God one can be."

"It's not quite hell, a place in which God has a unique, almost competitive interest. It's just a place he would never think to look — a place he ignores, a place where, left to our own devices, we become exactly who we are."

The novelist Gary Shteyngart imagined how it really unfolded, down in Antarctica, where a Russian scientist, Sergey Savitsky, stabbed a co-worker, the welder Oleg Beloguzov, purportedly because Beloguzov was spoiling the ending to the novels Savitsky was reading.

I strongly recommend that you listen to the audio reading (by Shteyngart, who is Russian). It's one of the best things I've ever heard on "The American Life." Transcript here.

I listened once, then listened again, then went to Amazon and bought the Kindle and Audiobook versions of his Shteyngart's novel "Lake Success."

For a journalistic version of the real-life story Shteyngart imagined, here's "Antarctica scientist stabbed colleague for spoiling book endings" (from last October in the NY Post).