"It is good to have a complete collection of Gogol's tales and plays under one cover...Only Dead Souls, easily available elsewhere, is excluded. Here is God's plenty: the early Ukrainian folk tales, the Cossack epic Taras Bulba, and all the incomparable humorous and grotesque stories: Old-World Landowners, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, Nevsky Prospekt, Diary of a Madman, The Nose, and, of course, The Overcoat. Here is even The Portrait in its final version... and here are all three plays, The Inspector General, The Marriage, and The Gamblers.  "Mr. Kent has thoroughly revised the translation of Mrs. Garnett, which has long been out of print and difficult to find.

Mrs. Garnett is now often disparaged as a translator, but she is always conscientious and skillful. Mr. Kent has eliminated the Victorianisms of her style, has corrected mistakes and pruderies of diction, and has made the whole translation sound much more contemporary and alive. But he has avoided the whimsicality and 'curliness' in which some recent translators indulged, and he has not changed or suppressed anything material. He has also supplied helpful notes which are often the first annotation in English, and he has written an introduction which steers the correct middle course between making Gogol an irresponsible artist of the grotesque and proving him a documentary historian of backward Russia. 

"This volume should do something for increasing Gogol's fame as the most original, imaginative and exuberant of all Russian writers, as the greatest comedian and humorist among a rather solemn lot."
-Rene Wellek
Yale University