I'm reading George Saunders' A Swim in the Pond in The Rain where the celebrated author and fiction writing teacher takes us through stories by Chekhov, Tugenev, Tolstoy and Gogol and I have to admit that for days I've been dying to get to his discussion of Gogol's story "The Nose" because Saunders' fiction -- inventive and absurd, reminds me much more of Gogol than the other writers.