Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Top 10 ghost stories

For the Guardian, Peter Washington named a top 10 list of ghost stories.

One entry on the list:
Nikolai Gogol The Nose and The Overcoat

These two stories are as far as one could get from the standard ghost story – not at all frightening but very, very disturbing: wild surreal satires of 19th century Russian bureaucracy in which a nose and an overcoat take on lives of their own and wreak havoc. Gogol's crazy comedy has a logic of its own which has never been bettered.
Read about the other nine entries on Washington's list.

Related: Brad Leithauser's five best ghost tales and James Hynes' 10 Halloween stories.

--Marshal Zeringue