"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 Ukrainian countryside.

Together, they reveal Gogol's marvelously skewed perspective, moving between the urban and the rural with painfully sharp humour and scorching satire.