Vladimir Nabokov's notorious, hilarious erotic murder mystery takes the form of a monologue by his hero, Humbert Humbert, as he attempts to justify his love for and obsession with the barely adolescent Dolores Haze, known as Lolita. Humbert's cross-country flight with his adored nymphet ends with her betrayal of him with his rival, the evil Quilty ...
Written in Berlin in 1934, "Invitation to a Beheading" contains all the surprise, excitement and magical intensity of a work created in two brief weeks of sustained inspiration. It takes us into the fantastic prison-world of Cincinnatus, a man condemned to death and spending his last days in prison not quite knowing when the end will come. Nabokov ...
Generally considered one of Nabokov's greatest works, PALE FIRE consists of a 999-line poem written by a professor named John Shade, and a scholarly commentary on it by his colleague, Charles Kinbote. The novel is a satire of literary scholarship and American university life; it is also a study of creativity in both its constructive and ...
Plotted like a chess match, THE DEFENSE is a heavily ironic novel about a grandmaster who lives only for chess. Finally, he goes mad and, in order to regain his sanity, he must renounce the game. Unable to do so, he plays chess endlessly in his head until the final move, which is his death: the world is nothing but a game of chess. THE DEFENSE is ...
Vladimir Nabokov's dazzling autobiography, published in 1966, is a dense and enchanting flood of recollections--of his comfortable bourgeois childhood and adolescence, his obsession with lepidoptery, his rich and liberal-minded father, his beautiful and compassionate mother, an army of relations and hangers-on, and St. Petersburg in pre ...
Vladimir Nabokov was hailed by Salman Rushdie as the most important writer ever to cross the boundary between one language and another. A Russian emigre who began writing in English after his forties, Nabokov was a trilingual author, equally competent in Russian, English, and French. A gifted and tireless translator, he bridged the gap between ...
Nabokov's first novel written in America was inspired by his vision of the madness of totalitarianism, which he called "idiotic and despicable." Adam Krug, an internationally celebrated professor of philosophy, is asked by an old schoolmate, now a power-mad dictator, to lend his support to his brutal regime. Krug refuses. His friends are ...
For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.
PNIN was the last novel Nabokov wrote in America, in 1957 when he was teaching at Cornell. It is the story of a drab, gentle, lovable failure: Timofey Pnin, an émigré Russian teacher at a mediocre upstate New York college who fails to get tenure and ultimately loses his job. Pnin's history amusingly resembles what Nabokov's might have been had he ...
When "Lolita" was first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. This annotated edition, a revised and considerably expanded version of the 1970 edition, does full justice to the textual riches of "Lolita", illuminating the elaborate verbal textures and ...
The library of America is dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to ...
One of Nabokov's masterpieces; a complex love story troubled by incest. But there's more; it is also a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel and erotic catalogue.
Spurred on by admiration for his novelist half-brother and irritation at the biography written about him by Mr Goodman ('his slapdash and very misleading book'), the narrator, V, sets out to record Sebastian Knight's life as he understands it. But buried amid the extensive quoting, digressions, seeming explanations and meaningful digs at Mr ...
Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, this is Nabokov's 'other' great love story; with some of Lolita's perversity and much more playfulness. Romance follows Ada and Van from their first childhood meeting through eight years of rapture, in a book which is regarded by many to be Nabokov's richest and most ambitious.
Nabokov's first novel (1925) is a comic fantasy about a Russian émigré army officer who is living in a seedy Berlin boarding house. Nostalgically, he remembers his first, idyllic love affair with the lovely Mary ("Mashenka"). Inevitably, he contrasts his old life before the Revolution with his present one, which includes the unpleasant man in the ...
Nabokov shows that Gogol's comedy was not Dickensian, but biting and salty, textured throughout by a use of the irrational not duplicated by any other writer; that in the play "The Government Inspector" and "Dead Souls," a novel, his depiction of the frauds of bureaucracy and the vagaries of Russian serf-owners were not so much intended to hasten ...
"In an era of inept and ignorant imitations, whose piped-in background music has hypnotized innocent readers into fearing literality's salutary jolt, some reviewers were upset by the humble fidelity of my version..." Such was Vladimir Nabokov's response to the storm of controversy aroused by the first edition of his literal translation of Eugene ...
Vladimir Nabokov's notorious, hilarious erotic murder mystery takes the form of a monologue by his hero, Humbert Humbert, as he attempts to justify his love for and obsession with the barely adolescent Dolores Haze, known as Lolita. Humbert's cross-country flight with his adored nymphet ends with her betrayal of him with his rival, the evil Quilty ...
In this very short novel, Hugh Person is an American who makes four trips to Switzerland representing the publisher he works for. During the first, his father dies, and in subsequent visits things go from bad to worse. He becomes involved in a complicated love affair, a farcical murder by a sleepwalker, and a disastrous fire. Eventually, we ...
From one of the greatest prose stylists of our time,his complete short stories, including 13 hitherto unpublished,brought toghether for the first time.
Deeply influenced by ALICE IN WONDERLAND (which Nabokov translated into Russian), this is a novel about a love triangle: a callow youth named Franz; the wealthy uncle who employs him in his glitzy Berlin emporium; and the uncle's wife, Martha, who seduces Franz. The novel was written during Nabokov's 18-year exile in Berlin where--impoverished, ...
Nabokov's biographer, Brian Boyd, and lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle have compiled Nabokov's writings on the subject of butterflies, a collection that includes poems, letters, journal entries, and bits of stories. Nabokov was as accomplished a lepidopterist as he was a writer; during the 1940s, at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, he ...
THE GIFT is the phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after the First World War. This gorgeous tapesty of literature and butterflies tells the story of Fyodor's pursuits as a writer. Its heroine is not Fyodor's elusive and beloved Zina, however, but ...
Nabokov chronicles the aimless and unremarkable life of Martin Edelweiss: his Swiss-Russian background, his parents' divorce, the death of his father, his mother's remarriage, his years at Oxford, and his love affair with the fickle Sonia. Uninterested in a career after university, Martin wanders Europe, working at odd jobs. Then, suddenly, he ...
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