The Nose

By Nikolai Gogol,

Book cover of The Nose

Book description

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.'

With this pair of absurd, comic stories Gogol indulges his imagination and delights readers.

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Nose as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I grew up speaking Russian with my grandparents and always yearned to read classic Russian literature in the original. Perhaps it was my great love for those grandparents or the stories they told that led me to major in Russian at Yale University. Like any translated work, Russian literature loses something in translation. Still, it gains something, too, effectively juxtaposing a culture that is neither Eastern nor Western yet entirely alien to most of us today.

Satire, dark humor, and perfect pacing make this story a laugh-out-loud work, at least to me. Despite being ridiculous, its delivery is straight-faced, which…

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Nine Stories Told Completely in Dialogue is a unique collection of narratives, each unfolding entirely through conversations between its characters. The book opens with "God on a Budget," a tale of a man's surreal nighttime visitation that offers a blend of the mundane and the mystical. In "Doctor in the…

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