Speak, Nabokov

Speak, Nabokov PDF Author: Michael Maar
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1844674371
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
On the eve of the controversial, posthumous publication of The Original of Laura, Michael Maar follows his critically acclaimed The Two Lolitas with a revealing new perspective on Vladimir Nabokov’s life and work. Hunting down long-hidden clues in the novels, and using the themes that run through Nabokov’s fiction to illuminate the life that produced them, Maar constructs a compelling psychological and philosophical portrait. Characteristically graceful and engaging, Speak, Nabokov offers a vital new perspective on the twentieth-century master.

Speak, Nabokov

Speak, Nabokov PDF Author: Michael Maar
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1844674371
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
On the eve of the controversial, posthumous publication of The Original of Laura, Michael Maar follows his critically acclaimed The Two Lolitas with a revealing new perspective on Vladimir Nabokov’s life and work. Hunting down long-hidden clues in the novels, and using the themes that run through Nabokov’s fiction to illuminate the life that produced them, Maar constructs a compelling psychological and philosophical portrait. Characteristically graceful and engaging, Speak, Nabokov offers a vital new perspective on the twentieth-century master.

Think, Write, Speak

Think, Write, Speak PDF Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101874929
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
A rich compilation of the previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, edited by Nabokov experts Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy. “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov’s supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.

Riots I Have Known

Riots I Have Known PDF Author: Ryan Chapman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501197312
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Longlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Ryan Chapman’s “gritty, bracing debut” (Esquire) set during a prison riot is “dark, daring, and laugh-out-loud hilarious…one of the smartest—and best—novels of the year” (NPR). A largescale riot rages through Westbrook prison in upstate New York, incited by a poem in the house literary journal. Our unnamed narrator, barricaded inside the computer lab, swears he’s blameless—even though, as editor-in-chief, he published the piece in question. As he awaits violent interruption by his many, many enemies, he liveblogs one final Editor’s Letter. Riots I Have Known is his memoir, confession, and act of literary revenge. His tale spans a childhood in Sri Lanka, navigating the postwar black markets and hotel chains; employment as a Park Avenue doorman, serving the widows of the one percent; life in prison, with the silver lining of his beloved McNairy; and his stewardship of The Holding Pen, a “masterpiece of post-penal literature” favored by Brooklynites everywhere. All will be revealed, and everyone will see he’s really a good guy, doing it for the right reasons. “Fitfully funny and murderously wry,” Riots I Have Known is “a frenzied yet wistful monologue from a lover of literature under siege” (Kirkus Reviews).

Stalking Nabokov

Stalking Nabokov PDF Author: Brian Boyd
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231158572
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
In this book, Brian Boyd surveys Vladimir Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd also offers new ways of reading Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, disclosing otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections as he recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's life? oeuvre?, he cautions against using Nabokov's metaphysics as the key to unlocking all of the enigmatic author's secrets. Assessing and appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever Nabokov's multifaceted genius.

Letters to Véra

Letters to Véra PDF Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 110187581X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 866

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Book Description
No marriage of a major twentieth-century writer is quite as beguiling as that of Vladimir Nabokov’s to Véra Slonim. She shared his delight at the enchantment of life’s trifles and literature’s treasures, and he rated her as having the best and quickest sense of humor of any woman he had met. From their first encounter in 1923, Vladimir’s letters to Véra chronicle a half-century-long love story, one that is playful, romantic, and memorable. At the same time, the letters reveal much about their author. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everything—animals, people, speech, landscapes and cityscapes—and glimpse his ceaseless work on his poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays, and translations. This delightful volume is enhanced by twenty-one photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters and the puzzles and drawings Vladimir often sent to Véra. With 8 pages of photographs and 47 illustrations in text

Strong Opinions

Strong Opinions PDF Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679726098
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
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 intriguing insight into one of the most brilliant authors of the 20th century." - The Guardian Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, among other subjects. Keen to dismiss those who fail to understand his work and happy to butcher those sacred cows of the literary canon he dislikes, Nabokov is much too entertaining to be infuriating, and these interviews, letters and articles are as engaging, challenging and caustic as anything he ever wrote.

The Two Lolitas

The Two Lolitas PDF Author: Michael Maar
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786631865
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
A leading German scholar reveals his astonishing discovery about Nabokov’s influential novel We know the girl and her story, just as we know the title. But the author was Heinz von Eschwege, whose tale of Lolita appeared in 1916 under the pen name Heinz von Lichberg, forty years before Nabokov’s celebrated novel took the world by storm. Von Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful work faded from view. The Two Lolitas uncovers a remarkable series of parallels between the two works and their authors—too many for coincidence. With an introduction by best-selling German novelist Daniel Kehlmann, Maar’s extraordinary literary detective story casts new light on the making of one of the most influential works of the twentieth century. This new edition includes an interview with the author, conducted by Kehlmann, in which Maar reveals that since writing the book he has discovered what might be the final piece of the puzzle.

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov PDF Author: Andrea Pitzer
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453271678
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics? Using information from newly-declassified intelligence files and recovered military history, journalist Andrea Pitzer argues that far from being a proponent of art for art’s sake, Vladimir Nabokov managed to hide disturbing history in his fiction—history that has gone unnoticed for decades. Nabokov emerges as a kind of documentary conjurer, spending the most productive decades of his career recording a saga of forgotten concentration camps and searing bigotry, from World War I to the Gulag and the Holocaust. Lolita surrenders Humbert Humbert’s secret identity, and reveals a Nabokov appalled by American anti-Semitism. The lunatic narrator of Pale Fire recalls Russian tragedies that once haunted the world. From Tsarist courts to Nazi film sets, from CIA front organizations to wartime Casablanca, the story of Nabokov’s family is the story of his century—and both are woven inextricably into his fiction.

Insomniac Dreams

Insomniac Dreams PDF Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196907
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
First publication of an index-card diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams and subsequent daytime episodes, allowing the reader a glimpse of his innermost life.

The Art of Fiction

The Art of Fiction PDF Author: David Lodge
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448137799
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.