Books by Vladimir Nabokov

Book SynopsisWhen 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 showing how they contribute to the novel''s overall meaning. Alfred Appel, Jr. also provides fresh observations on the novel''s artifice, games and verbal patternings and a delightful biographical vignette of Nabokov. The annotations themselves were prepared in consultation with Nabokov while newly identified allusions were confirmed by him during the final years of his life.

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Book Synopsis''Speak, memory'', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itself a work of art.

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Book SynopsisVladimir Nabokov's early novel is the dazzling story of the coarse, strange yet oddly endearing chess-playing genius Luzhin. Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess that renders the real world a phantom. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmaster Turati, he brings into play his carefully devised defence. Making masterly play of metaphor and imagery, The Defense is the book that, of his early works, Nabokov felt 'contains and diffuses the greatest warmth'.

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Book SynopsisProfessor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding house; and the trials of taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has yet to master.Wry, intelligent and moving, Pnin reveals the absurd and affecting story of one man in exile.

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Book SynopsisEl mateix Humbert narra el foll itinerari per carreteres i motels, fent un àcid retrat de l'estil de vida nord-americà, amb una enlluernadora combinació de lirisme i d'ironia. Lolita, publicada l'any 1956 als Estats Units, fou objecte de prohibicions i judicis i, posteriorment, d'innombrables imitacions. Avui és considerada, amb unanimitat, una obra clàssica del segle XX.

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Book Synopsis''Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine'' Martin Amis, ObserverPoet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, ''to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets''. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert''s fixation is one of many dimensions in Nabokov''s dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.''There''s no funnier monster in literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert'' IndependentTrade ReviewHe did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language. * Anthony Burgess *Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears. * The Guardian *There's no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert. * The Independent *

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Book SynopsisNabokov described this novella, written in Paris in 1939 but only published twenty years later, as ''the first little throb of Lolita''. The plot is similar: a middle-aged man wedding an unattractive widow in order to indulge his paedophilic obsession with her daughter. However, The Enchanter has an utterly different atmosphere, as time, place and even names remain a mystery. Nabokov transforms his protagonist''s attempts to lull his twelve-year-old step-daughter into a state of ''enchantment'' into a graceful, chilling fairytale.

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Book SynopsisVladimir Nabokov (Author) Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.Brian Boyd (External Editor, Translator) Brian Boyd, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has long been associated with the work of Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, translator and more. His works have appeared in nineteen languages and won awards on four continents.

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Book SynopsisNo 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

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Book SynopsisOne of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character.  Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, Pnin brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity.“Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.” —Chicago TribuneProfessor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature b

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Book SynopsisThe state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine ''Average Man'' party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has done away with individualism and freedom of thought. Only John Krug, a brilliant philosopher, stands up to the regime. His antagonist, the leader of the new party, is his old school enemy, Paduk - known as the ''Toad''. Grieving over his wife''s recent death, Krug is at first dismissive of Paduk''s activities and sees no threat in them. But the sinister machine which Paduk has set in motion may prove stronger than the individual, stronger even than the grotesque ''Toad'' himself.

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Book SynopsisThe classic novel from the author of Lolita, brilliantly portraying one man's ruin through love and betrayal.Trade Review"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written—that is, ecstatically." -- John Updike

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Book SynopsisFrom one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. • Scintillating … One finds here amazing glimpses into the life of a world that has vanished forever. —The New York Times Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. Nabokov's memoir is a moving account of a loving, civilized family, of adolescent awakenings, flight from Bolshevik terror, education in England, and émigré life in Paris and Berlin. The Nabokovs were eccentric, liberal aristocrats, who lived a life immersed in politics and literature on splendid country estates until their world was swept away by the Russian revolution when the author was eighteen years old. Speak, Memory vividly evokes a vanished past in the inimitable prose of Nabokov at his best.

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Book SynopsisAn autobiographical volume which recounts the story of Nabokov's first forty years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War Two. It tells of his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, and his passions for butterflies and his lost homeland. Written in this writer's characteristically brilliant, mordant style, this book is also a tender record of lost childhood and youth in pre-Revolutionary Russia.

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Book Synopsis''One of the greatest books I''ve ever read. Its heart is strange, but it is huge; let yours beat in response'' MARY GAITSKILLPale Fire, a 999-line poem, is the final work of the celebrated - and recently murdered - American author, John Francis Shade.Here that poem is transcribed, introduced and annotated (at length) by Shade''s fellow scholar, neighbour and apparent friend, Charles Kinbote.Approaching this task with gusto, Kinbote''s annotations reveal conclusive evidence of his own impact on Shade, disguised references to the northern land of Zembla, which he may or may not have once ruled over, and fuel for his many preoccupations and paranoia.And - as his annotations become more desperate, more deluded, more deranged - Kinbote unintentionally sheds new light on the poet''s last days and the pair''s ''glorious friendship''.A murder mystery, a work of wild invention, a reimagining of what the novel can do, a piece of exquisite

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Book SynopsisSmurov, a fussily self-conscious Russian tutor, shoots himself after a humiliating beating by his mistress'' husband. Unsure whether his suicide has been successful or not, Smurov drifts around Berlin, observing his acquaintances, but finds he can discover very little about his own life from the opinions of his distracted, confused fellow-émigrés. Nabokov''s shortest novel, The Eye is both a satirical detective story and a wonderfully layered exploration of identity, appearance and the loss of self in a world of word-play and confusion.

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Book Synopsis''Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine'' Martin Amis, ObserverPoet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, ''to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets''. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert''s fixation is one of many dimensions in Nabokov''s dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.''There''s no funnier monster in literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert'' Independent

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Book Synopsis''A great work of art, radiant and rapturous, affirming the power of love and imagination'' The New York Times Book ReviewAda or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle''s country estate, in a ''dream-bright'' America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are continually parted and reunited, come to learn the strange truth about their singular relationship and, decades later, put their extraordinary experiences into words. Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, Nabokov''s longest, richest novel is a love story, but also a fairy tale, a historical parody, an erotic satire, an exploration of the passing of time and a supreme work of the imagination.

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Book SynopsisA 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; a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil. In these sixty-five stories of magic and melancholy, Nabokov displays an astonishing range of inventiveness, with dazzling sleight of hand, fantastical fairy tales, intellectual games and enchanting glimpses into lives of ambiguity and loss.The collection displays Nabokov''s astonishing range of technical and formal inventiveness: the dazzling sleight of hand, fanciful fairy tales, ingenious puzzles, enchanting vignettes and haunting melancholic narratives full of disturbing ambiguities.

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Book SynopsisProfessor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding house; and the trials of taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has yet to master.Wry, intelligent and moving, Pnin reveals the absurd and affecting story of one man in exile.

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Book Synopsis''A work of rapture - jolting, hilarious and incredibly racy'' Martin Amis, The TimesSelf-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with Felix, a man he believes to be his double, reveals a frightening ''split'' in Hermann''s nature. Convinced that he has found his doppelgänger, Hermann uses this discovery to weave a money-making plan that leads to disguise, betrayal and eventually murder. Filled with impudent, startling humour, and dominated by the egotistical and scornful figure of a killer who thinks himself an artist, Despair takes us into a deranged world of doubles and illusions, where nothing is quite as it seems.

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Book SynopsisThe American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade''s editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the ''Great Beaver'', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should. Nabokov''s darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.Trade ReviewThis centaur work, half-poem, half-prose . . . is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the great works of art of this century -- Mary McCarthy

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Book SynopsisWritten 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 described the book as ''a violin in a void. The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures ... The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita ... But I know a few readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair''.

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Book Synopsis''Vladimir Nabokov was a literary genius'' David Lodge''Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest'', Nabokov wrote of King, Queen, Knave. Comic, sensual and cerebral, it dramatizes an Oedipal love triangle, a tragi-comedy of husband, wife and lover, through Dreyer the rich businessman, his ripe-lipped ad mercenary wife Martha, and their bespectacled nephew Franz. ''If a resolute Freudian manages to slip in'' - Nabokov darts a glance to the reader - ''he or she should be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there...

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Book SynopsisThe 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 tapestry 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 Russian prose and poetry themselves.

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Book SynopsisVladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.

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Book SynopsisSpurred 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 digs, Sebastian''s erratic and troubled persona remains as elusive as ever.Nabokov''s first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a nuanced, enigmatic potrayal of the conflict between the real and the unreal, and the futile quest for human truth.

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Book SynopsisAlbinus - rich, married middle-aged and respectable - is an art critic and aspiring filmmaker who lusts after the coquettish young cinema usherette Margot. Gradually he seduces her and convinces himself he is irresistible to her, but Margot has other plans. She wants to be a film star, and when Albinus introduces her to the American movie producer Axel Rex, she sees her chance - and plotting, duplicity and tragedy ensue.

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Book Synopsis''In general Glory is my happiest thing.'' ''The fun of Glory is . . . to be sought in the echoing and linking of minor events, in back-and-forth switches, which produce an illusion of impetus; in an old daydream directly becoming the blessing of the ball hugged to one''s chest, or in the casual vision of Martin''s mother grieving beyond the time-frame of the novel in an abstraction of the future that the reader can only guess at, even after he has raced through the last seven chapters where a regular madness of structural twists and a masquerade of all characters culminate in a furious finale, although nothing much happens at the very end - just a bird perching on a wicket in the greyness of a wet day'' - Vladimir Nabokov

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Book SynopsisThe Original of Laura is Vladimir Nabokov''s final, incredible unfinished novel in fragments. Dr Philip Wild, a man of brilliance, wit, fortune and tremendous bulk, is used to suffering humiliations at the hands of his wife, the younger, slender, and rudely promiscuous Flora. But in a novel, a ''maddening masterpiece'' documenting her infidelities, written by one of her lovers and given to the doctor, she appears as My Laura. Dishonoured, Wild still finds pleasure in life, by indulging in self-annihilation, beginning with the removal of his toes.

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Book Synopsis''Nabokov can move you to laughter in the way that masters can - to laughter that is near to tears'' GuardianLev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian émigrés. Alone in his room, he dreams of his first love, Mary. Awash with memories of youth and idyllic scenes of pre-Revolution Russia, Ganin becomes convinced that Mary is in fact the wife of a fellow-boarder, due to arrive at this very house soon. He longs for her arrival, when he can whisk her away and leave everything behind ...

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Book SynopsisThese masterly poems span the decades of Nabokov''s career, from ''Music'', written in 1914, to the short, playful ''To Vera'', composed in 1974. ''The University Poem'', one of Nabokov''s major poetic works, is here in English for the first time: an extraordinary autobiographical poem looking back at his time at Cambridge, with its dinners, girls and memories, it is suffused with rich description, wit and verbal dexterity. Included too are the surreally comic ''A Literary Dinner'', the enchanting, ''Eve'', the wryly humorous ''An Evening of Russian Poetry'' and a meditation on the act of creation, ''Tolstoy'', as well as verse written on America, lepidoptery, sport, love and Nabokov''s Russian homeland.Trade ReviewThe poems are coy, clever, sophisticated, sonorous and worldly. In other words, Nabokovian * New York Daily News *

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Book Synopsis''He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language'' Anthony Burgess''Look at the harlequins ... Play! Invent the world! Invent reality''. This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US, and, now dying, reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre ''numerical nimbus syndrome''.Trade Review'He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language'

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Book SynopsisThe 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 sent to ingratiate himself with a distinguished novelist, he met his future wife. Nabokov''s brilliant short novel sinks into the transparent things of the world that surround this one Person, to the silent histories they carry.Remarkable even in Nabokov''s work for its depth and lyricism, Transparent Things is a small, experimental marvel of memories and dreams, both sentimental and malign.

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewFor those of us who are Vladimir Nabokov completists perhaps we finally have closure ... Now we have the full Nabokovian ex cathedra pronouncements in all their typical vim and vigour. -- William Boyd * Times Literary Supplement *Masterly, hilarious, truly insightful ... Vladimir Nabokov's views are of compelling interest - paradoxically, because he regularly insisted that his novels sent no message, made no moral case and presented no argument ... His non-fiction stands up astonishingly well. -- Philip Hensher * The Spectator *A rich treat for Nabokov's admirers. * Kirkus *The writer's genius for nailing a subject in a sentence lives on in his stinging reviews and defensive interviews. -- Christian Lorentzen * Financial Times *A fuller, and maybe truer, image of Nabokov ... The greatest pleasure in reading this book is the impression you get that you're opening your presents underneath the Christmas tree ... A lovely blend of literary elements and of personal details pertaining to Nabokov: you experience intellectual marvel when you detect the premises of a famous quote or a literary pattern, and you feel particular pleasure when you get a glimpse of the man hiding behind the famous writer and becoming suddenly relatable. -- Julie Loison-Charles * Transatlantica *

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Book SynopsisThe acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, and Chekhov.In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov's teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. This volume collects Nabokov's famous lectures on nineteenth-century Russian literature, with analysis and commentary on Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls and The Overcoat; Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons; Maxim Gorky's On the Rafts; Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych; two short stories and a play by Anton Chekhov; and several works by Fyodor Dostoevsky, including Crime and Punishment, The

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Book SynopsisThirteen strangely wrought, ingeniously crafted stories make up Nabokov''s baker''s dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie stifled, smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in all the corners. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, they sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.Trade ReviewAt their best they display a Lawrentian power of evocation, a Proustian depth of subtlty, sadness and loss * Sunday Times *

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Book Synopsis''The illegible signature of teetering disaster'' Three great stories--The Aurelian, Signs and Symbols and Lance--the last both a derisive attack on science-fiction and an attempt to imagine the real pain and horror that would accompany space travel. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York''s underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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Book SynopsisIntroducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world''s greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-SmithCelebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov''s baker''s dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, these stories sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve

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Book SynopsisVladimir Nabakov''s shocking masterpiece, now in a beautifully designed clothbound edition''Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine'' Martin AmisPoet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, ''to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets''. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert''s seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov''s dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 starring James Mason and Peter Sellers, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne starring Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.

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