The Overcoat: Four Corners Familiars

Published as part of the Four Corners Familiars series, this beautiful edition of the great Russian author Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat (a short story originally published in 1842) includes newly commissioned artwork from Sarah Dobai. This influential story–in which a lowly government clerk’s life is briefly transformed by the extravagant purchase of a new coat–has been adapted into a variety of stage and film interpretations; as Fyodor Dostoevsky remarked on the story’s impact in Russian literature, We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’ Artist, filmmaker and photographer Sarah Dobai responds to the story’s preoccupation with material desire and illusion; the text is printed alongside her photographs of shop windows in London and Paris, showing ready-made still lifes of merchandise and mannequins in window displays. Combining contemporary visual work with a beloved 19th-century classic, this special edition of The Overcoat reimagines Gogol for a new generation.