"We all come from Gogol's Overcoat," said Dostoevsky. Alongside this, his most famous story, there are seven other narratives by Nikolai Gogol gathered here, translated with vigor and a wide stylistic range by Eberhard Reissner. Gogol is one of the most idiosyncratic and peculiar prose writers in world literature. Some early texts, such as The Fair at Sorochyntsi and The Viy, reveal a lesser-known but equally fascinating side of Gogol. With Nevsky Prospect, The Portrait, and especially with the surreal story The Nose, he made his city, St. Petersburg, literarily immortal. "Gogol's prose," says the Petersburgian Vladimir Nabokov, "has at least four dimensions.".