Books by Vladimir Nabokov

Book Synopsis90 Classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksAnd this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!'A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah and the Devil disguised as a middle-aged woman appear in these playful, exuberant stories by Vladimir Nabokov. So do a vengeful husband, a barber confronting his torturer and the author himself, as he recalls his first love. Each of the thirteen tales here enchants and enraptures us, only to gleefully confound our expectations.

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Book Synopsis''Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.''Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady''s twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he''ll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?Trade ReviewYou read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent -- Martin Amis * Observer *A masterpiece. One of the great works of art of our age * Independent *His command of words, his joy in them, his comic and ecstatic use of them...makes reading his work such an intense joy * Daily Telegraph *Lolita is more the shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny ... a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes * Time *A great novel ... It widens our own humanity * Guardian *There's no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert. Going to hell in his company would always be worth the ride * Independent *Redeeming, spendid, headlong, endlessly comic and evocative -- John UpdikeRapturous ... incendiary * Time Out *

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Book SynopsisVladimir Nabokov''s Lolita is one of the best-known novels of the 20th century: the controversial story of Humbert Humbert who falls in love with twelve year old Lolita, beautifully repackaged as part of the Penguin Essentials range.''Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.''Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady''s twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he''ll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?Trade ReviewA masterpiece. One of the great works of art of our age * Independent *There's no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert. Going to hell in his company would always be worth the ride * Independent *A great novel . . . It widens our own humanity * Guardian *You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent -- Martin Amis * Observer *Nabokov's command of words, his joy in them, his comic and ecstatic use of them, makes reading his work such an intense joy * Daily Telegraph *Lolita is more the shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny ... a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes * Time *

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Book SynopsisLolita, la más famosa y controversial novela de Vladimir Nabokov, cuenta la historia de la obsesión devoradora del cuarentón Humbert Humbert por la nínfula Dolores Haze. Ternura y fascinación —además de tristeza y un humor mordaz— llenan sus páginas pero es, por encima de todo, una meditación sobre el amor—el amor como abuso y alucinación, locura y transformación.

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Book SynopsisThough we know Vladimir Nabokov as a brilliant novelist, his first love was poetry. This landmark collection brings together the best of his verse, including many pieces that have never before appeared in English.These poems span the whole of Nabokov’s career, from the newly discovered “Music,” written in 1914, to the short, playful “To Véra,” composed in 1974. Many are newly translated by Dmitri Nabokov, including The University Poem, a sparkling novel in verse modeled on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that constitutes a significant new addition to Nabokov’s oeuvre. Included too are such poems as “Lilith”, an early work which broaches the taboo theme revisited nearly forty years later in Lolita, and “An Evening of Russian Poetry”, a masterpiece in which Nabokov movingly mourns his lost language in the guise of a versified lecture on Russian delivered to college girls. The subj

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Book SynopsisFrom one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman's Library edition includes, for the first time, the previously unpublished Chapter 16–the most significant unpublished piece of writing by the master, newly released by the Nabokov estate–which provided an extraordinary insight into Speak, Memory. 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 evoke

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Book SynopsisNabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as a classic not to the controversy its subject matter aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. With an introduction by Martin Amis. When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

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Book SynopsisOne of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsThe urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, this darkly witty novel of suspense, literary one-upmanship, and political intrigue achieves that rarest of things in literature–perfect tragicomic balance. With an introduction by Richard Rorty.

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Book SynopsisPublished 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 tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.  Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously  sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

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Book SynopsisLike 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 defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.

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Book SynopsisStrong 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 GuardianNabokov 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.

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Book SynopsisNabokov'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 chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life.  His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost:  in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality.   His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers  under his opponent's unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault.

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Book SynopsisConsidered by many to be the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. •  An interweaving of the effects of life and memory, tradition and heritage, upon art, the book tells of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished poet seeking fame in the phantasmic world of Berlin in the 1920s.A fascinating lesson in the truly staggering number of possible ways of writing and seeing. -Kirkus ReviewsThe Gift is the story 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 follows the pursuits of an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write.  The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of the initial period of his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking

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Book SynopsisFirst 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.Trade Review"One of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2017""A meditation on the ways our dreams unmoor us--from ourselves, from one another, from the most basic sense of duration."---Dan Piepenbring, The New Yorker"This is a celebratory enterprise, an ideal present for readers who are already fans. . . . Barabtarlo has a masterly command of Nabokov’s life and work."---Eric Naiman, Times Literary Supplement"[D]ream notes are at the heart of Insomniac Dreams, and are surrounded by helpful and intriguing background material."---Michael Wood, New York Review of Books"Nabokov's actual accounts of his dreams . . . are fantastic, and show in raw form the wit, facility, and inherent discipline of language easily recognizable as Nabokov’s handiwork. The author’s fans will be fascinated by the obsessions, fears, preoccupations, and minutiae revealed without filter or guard. . . . The note cards alone . . . will fortify Nabokov scholars for years to come." * Publishers Weekly *"Utterly fascinating."---William Boyd, The Guardian"Handsomely designed . . . [t]his is a looping, chronologically complicated book full of the kind of sleep-deprived, iridescently edged complexity that likes to gather around Vladimir Nabokov’s work."---Nicholson Baker, New Republic"[T]he volume’s foray into the subconscious is a suggestive . . . addition to the canon of Nabokoviana.”"---Francisco Unger, Essays in Criticism"For the casual reader drawn to big ideas, Insomniac Dreams can be as challenging as trying to reconstruct a dinosaur skeleton from a few simple bones. But it's a fascinating read for all the questions it raises—some of which the world's best minds have been tackling for centuries."---James Plath, PopMatters"Insomniac Dreams voices [Nabokov’s] ongoing translation, rereading and appraisal of his past selves during his lifetime, as well as his assured awareness of the reader’s voracious desire to sift through the detritus of his words and thoughts."---Melissa Purkiss, Oxonian Review

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Book SynopsisFirst 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.Trade Review"One of The Guardian’s Best Books of 2017"

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Book SynopsisNikolai Gogol was the most idiosyncratic of the great Russian novelists of the 19th century and lived a tragically short life which was as chaotic as the lives of the characters he created.

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Book SynopsisNikolai Gogol was one of the great geniuses of nineteenth century Russian literature, with a command of the irrational unmatched by any writer before or since. His strange tales, though often read as forceful demands for social change, were displays of the fantasies of the human spirit. In this ideal marriage of subject and critic, Nabokov analyses his endlessly inventive compatriot, focusing on the masterpieces Dead Souls, The Overcoat and The Government Inspector.Misunderstood by his contemporaries, mishandled by theatre directors and ending his life mistreated by doctors - with medicinal leeches hanging from his exceptional nose - it took Nabokov to give Gogol, 'the oddest Russian in Russia', the critical biography he and his singular, brilliant work deserve.

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Book SynopsisPoet 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 silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these? 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.

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