[thisisforyou]

'The Woman in the Dunes' by Kobo Abe: Sometimes called the Japanese Kafka. Looks at a Japanese salaryman who is imprisoned in the bottom of a sand pit with a woman he does not know and is forced to remove the sand in order to protect a nearby village. Creepy and ripe for symbolic analysis.

Before that:

'Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps' by Robert Conquest. A nice, short overview of the Kolyma Region with a special focus on the especially brutal years of 1937-1938. Has some great eyewitness accounts as well as some semi-rigorous historical analysis (as well as appendices of camps, administrative regions at c.)

[mrexroad]

"The Woman in the Dunes" is an excellent film as well.