Collected here are Gogol's finest tales — from the demon-haunted St John's Eve to the strange surrealism of The Nose, from the heart-rending trials of the copyist in The Overcoat to those of the delusional clerk in The Diary of a Madman — allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way for Dostoevsky and Kafka. To this superb new translation — the first in twenty-five years and destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's short fiction — Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky bring the same clarity and fidelity to the original that they brought to their brilliant translation of Dostoevsky's works and to War and Peace.