A baker's dozen of fiction by a modern master that spans the twentieth century from the last days of the Czars, to the Bolshevik Revolution, Nazi Germany, and contemporary middle-class America. Looking back nostalgically to the past and ahead to a fu...
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 a...
Amidst a Weimar-era milieu of silent film stars, artists, and aspirants, Nabokov creates a merciless masterpiece as Albinus, an aging critic, falls prey to his own desires, to his teenage mistress, and to Axel Rex, the scheming rival for her affectio...
The precursor to Nabokov's classic novel, Lolita. • A middle-aged man weds an unattractive widow in order to indulge his obsession with her daughter. • "A gem to be appreciated by any admirer of the most graceful and provocative ...
In this collection of short stories Vladimir Nabokov reflects upon the Russian "emigre" world of the 20s and 30s. Disconsolate, uprooted characters make up a tapestry which is shot through with nostalgia and irony. Vladimir Nabokov also wrote "Lolita...
A love triangle, where two of the members attempt to murder the third. • King, Queen, Knave, like all Nabokov’s writing, bears the unmistakable stamp of his genius " brilliant, erotic, deliciously macabre, and wholly unique.“Fascinating...
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that de...
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despai...
The darkly comic Transparent Things, one of Nabokov's final books, traces the bleak life of Hugh Person through murder, madness, prison and trips to Switzerland. One of these was the last journey his father ever took; on another, having been sen...
Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. It is also at once a fairy ta...
Strong Opinions offers Nabokov's trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita. • "First published in 1973, this collection of interviews and essays offers an intri...
The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and f...
A dying man cautiously unravels the mysteries of memory and creation. Vadim is a Russian émigré who, like Nabokov, is a novelist, poet and critic. There are threads linking the fictional hero with his creator as he reconstructs the images of his pa...
Nabokov's third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up ches...
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story -- subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax -- about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about Sebastian Knight as a distinguishe...
From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which...
This Library of America volume is the second of three volumes presenting the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.
Lolita (1955), Nabokov’s single most famous work, is one of t...
This Library of America volume is the third of three devoted to Vladimir Nabokov, and contains the evanescent works of his later years.
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), the longest of Nabokov’s novels, is a witty and parodic accoun...
This Library of America volume is the first of three volumes presenting the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Vladimir Nabok...
Newly translated works by Nabokov on the twin passions of his life, literature and lepidoptera. A rich array of never-before-seen Nabokovia: novels, stories, poems, autobiography, interviews, diaries, and more, plus scientific and fanciful drawings b...
Nabokov's third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes...
A man at his desk is interrupted by the appearance of a woodland elf in his room; the piano maestro Bachmann ends his career; a barber shaves the face of a man who once tortured him; and, a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil. In these sixty-five...
In this Readers' Guide, Christine Clegg examines the critical history of Lolita through a broad range of interpretations. Although early criticism of the text polarized around 'that' question - is it literature or pornography? - the influence of Amer...
Novelist, poet, critic, translator, and, above all, a peerless imaginer, Vladimir Nabokov was arguably the most dazzling prose stylist of the twentieth century. In novels like Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, he turned language into an instr...
The author of Lolita translates the celebrated, medieval epic Russian poem about a doomed campaign led by Prince Igor Sviatoslavich the Brave.A chivalric expedition is undertaken in the late twelfth century by a minor prince in the land of Rus...
"Nabokov's last metafictive parable. . . . One of the most interesting short stories Nabokov never wrote." -- San Francisco ChronicleWhen Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 hand-written index cards that...