Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel (1923–1926). The essential Odessa book. Babel's four stories about the Jewish gangster Benya Krik and the Moldavanka district are vivid, sardonic, and shot through with the city's particular mixture of violence, commerce, and self-dramatisation. Nothing else captures the Odessa of the early 20th century with this precision.
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (1833). Pushkin wrote several cantos of his verse novel during his Odessa exile (1823–1824), and the seaside city clearly got under his skin. The chapters written here have a looser, more sensuous quality than those written in confinement in Mikhailovskoye.
The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth (1972). A Cold War thriller set partly in Odessa, using the city's long history of double identity and concealment. Dated but atmospheric.
In the Land of Upside Down by Teffi (1930). The Russian-Ukrainian humorist Teffi wrote about Odessa with the affectionate scepticism of an outsider who appreciated what she found. Her sketches of Black Sea port life in the years around the revolution are as funny as anything in Russian literature.