Much admired in Europe, Landolfi has been called "the Italian Kafka"; he is often linked with the Surrealists, and in the intellectual quality of his fantasy there are certain affinities with Borges; but beyond these superficial comparisons, his is a truly unique--and fascinating--art. It is based in a prodigious imagination, a very curious sense of humor and a rare command of irony.

Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and play The Government Inspector revolutionized Russian literature and continue to entertain generations of readers around the world. Yet Gogol’s peculiar genius comes through most powerfully in his short stories. By turns—or at once—funny, terrifying, and profound, the tales collected in The Nose and Other Stories are among the greatest achievements of world literature. These stories showcase Gogol’s vivid, haunting imagination: an encounter with evil in a darkened church, a downtrodden clerk who dreams only of a new overcoat, a nose that falls off a face and reappears around town on its own, outranking its former owner. Written between 1831 and 1842, they span the colorful setting of rural Ukraine to the unforgiving urban landscape of St. Petersburg to the ancient labyrinth of Rome. Yet they share Gogol’s characteristic obsessions—city crowds, bureaucratic hierarchy and irrationality, the devil in disguise—and a constant undercurrent of the absurd. Susanne Fusso’s translations pay careful attention to the strangeness and wonder of Gogol's style, preserving the inimitable humor and oddity of his language. The Nose and Other Stories reveals why Russian writers from Dostoevsky to Nabokov have returned to Gogol as the cornerstone of their unparalleled literary tradition.

A collection of short comic stories “This world is full of the most outrageous nonsense. Sometimes things happen which you would hardly think possible.”-The Nose, Nikolai Gogol This is a collection of five short satiric stories by Nikolai Gogol that focus on the ugly and the sad elements in life.

Four outstanding works by great 19th-century Russian author: "The Nose," "Old-Fashioned Farmers," "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich," and "The Overcoat."

Fresh, stylish new translations of Gogol's greatest short stories collected in a beautiful edition 'One of the most profound, and influential, writers Russia has ever produced, he is probably also the funniest' Guardian 'The most morally complete writer: baffled, outraged, reverent, mock-didactic, mocking, all at once. He honours life by feeling no one way about it' GEORGE SAUNDERS No writer has captured the absurdity of the human condition as acutely as Nikolai Gogol. In a lively new translation by Oliver Ready, this collection contains his great classic stories - 'The Overcoat', 'The Nose' and 'Diary of a Madman' - alongside lesser known gems depicting life in the Russian and Ukranian countryside. Together, they reveal Gogol's marvellously skewed perspective, moving between the urban and the rural with painfully sharp humour and scorching satire. Strikingly modern in his depictions of society's shambolic structures, Gogol plunders the depths of bureaucratic and domestic banalities to unearth moments of dark comedy and outrageous corruption. Defying categorisation, the stories in this collection range from the surreal to the satirical to the grotesque, united in their exquisite psychological acuteness and tender insights into the bizarre irrationalities of the human soul. Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-1852) was born in Ukraine and moved to St Petersburg after his studies in 1828 to work, at first, in various government departments. His first collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), brought him widespread fame, and he went on to write further collections of stories, as well as the play The Government Inspector. The first part of his great, and only, novel Dead Souls appeared in 1842. In his later life he was increasingly tormented both physically and psychologically and he repeatedly burned his manuscripts, including the second part of Dead Souls. After the final burning in February 1852, he stopped eating and died in great pain ten days later.

"Gogol, Nikolai Vassilievitch. Born in the government of Pultowa, March 31 1809, died at Moscow, March 4 1852. A Russian novelist and dramatist. He was educated in a public gymnasium at Pultowa, and subsequently in the lyceum, then newly established, at Niejinsk. In 1831, Gogol brought out the first volume of his Ukrainian stories, 'Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka'. It met with immediate success, and he followed it a year later with a second volume. ‘The Nose’ is regarded as a masterwork of comic short fiction, and ‘The Overcoat’ is now seen as one of the greatest short stories ever written. Nikolai Gogol, the Russian writer and playwright, who understood better than any artist since what “perfect nonsense goes on in the world.” Born in Ukraine — then a colony dubbed “Little Russia” — Gogol began writing stories while pursuing a short-lived government career in St. Petersburg. He started with Ukrainian folklore, and a sinister, fairy-tale lightness persists in his later, more renowned stories about the imperial capital. There are supernatural accents, but the underlying world is real, made strange by an infrared humor that finds cosmic anarchy in the smallest fissures of everyday life. The most famous and inspirational works of Nikolai Gogol include The Mantle, Evenings at the Farm, St Petersburg Stories, Taras Bulba, a tale of the Cossacks, The Revizor, The Viy, The Nose, A May Night, The Mantle, Memoirs of a Madman and many more.

The incredible bestselling first novel from Pulitzer Prize- winning author, Jhumpa Lahiri. 'The kind of writer who makes you want to grab the next person and say "Read this!"' Amy Tan 'When her grandmother learned of Ashima's pregnancy, she was particularly thrilled at the prospect of naming the family's first sahib. And so Ashima and Ashoke have agreed to put off the decision of what to name the baby until a letter comes...' For now, the label on his hospital cot reads simply BABY BOY GANGULI. But as time passes and still no letter arrives from India, American bureaucracy takes over and demands that 'baby boy Ganguli' be given a name. In a panic, his father decides to nickname him 'Gogol' - after his favourite writer. Brought up as an Indian in suburban America, Gogol Ganguli soon finds himself itching to cast off his awkward name, just as he longs to leave behind the inherited values of his Bengali parents. And so he sets off on his own path through life, a path strewn with conflicting loyalties, love and loss... Spanning three decades and crossing continents, Jhumpa Lahiri's debut novel is a triumph of humane story-telling. Elegant, subtle and moving, The Namesake is for everyone who loved the clarity, sympathy and grace of Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies.

Using, or rather mimicking, traditional forms of storytelling Gogol created stories that are complete within themselves and only tangentially connected to a meaning or moral. His work belongs to the school of invention, where each twist and turn of the narrative is a surprise unfettered by obligation to an overarching theme. Selected from Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, Mirgorod, and the Petersburg tales and arranged in order of composition, the thirteen stories in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogolencompass the breadth of Gogol's literary achievement. From the demon-haunted “St. John's Eve ” to the heartrending humiliations and trials of a titular councilor in “The Overcoat,” Gogol's knack for turning literary conventions on their heads combined with his overt joy in the art of story telling shine through in each of the tales. This translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is as vigorous and darkly funny as the original Russian. It allows readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostevsky and Kafka.

"A most extraordinary thing happened in St. Petersburg on the twenty-fifth of March." The opening lines of "The Nose", one of Gogol’s best-known stories, and quite possibly the most absurd, are just as promising as any of his works. The simple yet extraordinary plot follows the story of the civil servant Major Kovalyov who wakes up one morning to discover his nose has left his face and is living a life of its own. Strange as it may seem, the nose has even surpassed him by attaining a higher rank! The story is a brilliant portrayal of the preoccupation with social rank in Imperial Russia, a biting satire of the bureaucrats’ pursuit of higher position within the Table of Ranks. A masterful combination of brilliant words, witty imagination, and unparalleled humor, it remains one of the most striking stories of all times. It is believed to have influenced masterpieces of world literature, including Dostoevsky's "The Double," Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", and Kafka’s "Metamorphosis". Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a Ukrainian-born Russian humorist, novelist, and dramatist whose work played a crucial role in the direction of Russian literature. He was considered to be one of the leading figures of Russian realism. His novel "Dead Souls", a satire of the political corruption in the Russian Empire, is viewed by many literary historians as the first great Russian novel. Among his contributions to Russian and world literature are the surrealistic and grotesque "The Nose" and "The Mantle", the satirical "The Government Inspector/The Inspector General", the historical novel "Taras Bulba", the comedy "Marriage", the humorous short stories "Diary of a Madman" and "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich". His works have influenced generations of readers and still continue to impress with their subtle psychologism and matchless style.

Nikolai Gogol, an early 19th century Ukrainian-born Russian novelist, humorist, and dramatist, created some of the most important works of world literature and is considered the father of modern Russian realism. Gogol satirized the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian Empire through the scrupulous and scathing realism of his writing, which would ultimately lead to his exile. Among some of his finest works are his short stories. Together in this collection are collected some of the best of these stories, they include the following: The Diary of a Madman, The Viy, The Mysterious Portrait, The Fair of Sorotchinetz, An Evening in May, Mid-Summer Evening, and The Carriage (The Calash).