Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day (Free subscription) | yesterday
"The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" was the first book that Vladimir Nabokov wrote in English. That was in 1938, by the way, when Nabokov realized, with war clouds gathering, that he'd have to leave Paris and find refuge...
Post-Darwinist (Free subscription) | 07/23/2008
So was Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) secretly a fundamentalist Christian, a mad man, or just plain ignorant? The great novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin) was, in his own telling, a "furious" critic of Darwinian theory. He based the judgment not on religion, to which biographer Brian Boyd writes that he was "profoundly indifferent," but on decades of his scientific study of butterflies, including at...
Darwiniana (Free subscription) | 07/17/2008
Vladimir Nabokov, “Furious” Darwin Doubter According to Boyd, Nabokov wrote “a major article,” subsequently lost, “with ‘furious refutations of “natural selection” and “the struggle for life.”‘” He completed the paper in 1941 but all that survives is a fragment in his memoir, Speak, Memory:
News & Information (Free subscription) | 07/09/2008
In the late 1930s, when Vladimir Nabokov realized that he would have to leave Paris, he saw two probable refuges, England and America, and accordingly began to write in English. “The Real Life of Sebastian……Read more
Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 07/04/2008
Frequent commenter Jim Salant sent me a link a while back to a reading by Mary Gaitskill of Vladimir Nabokov's Symbols and Signs (as they call it) and a discussion with The New Yorker 's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman (pronounced TREECE-man). Here 's a direct link to the mp3 file, in case you want to download it rather than playing it from the linked page, and here 's the story itself, one of...
ReadySteadyBlog (Free subscription) | 07/04/2008
The Lost Book Club is a "very elegant and slick site [...] supposed to be the 'home to any and all literary references made on the show — from Stephen King to Kurt Vonnegut.' (Or Adolfo Bioy Casares to Vladimir Nabokov.)" Via Three Percent .
International Herald Tribune (Free subscription) | 06/27/2008
In "Imagining Nabokov," Nina L. Khrushcheva provides stirring but ultimately hollow declarations, delivered up in a dizzying whirl of academic formalism, "intensely personal" reflection and wholesale generalization.
The First Post (Free subscription) | 06/23/2008
Literary agent Andrew Wylie (pictured), AKA 'The Jackal', has sealed a deal for the rights of the literary estate of the late Vladimir Nabokov. Wylie's coup is timely: in April,…
Dispatches from Zembla (Free subscription) | 06/22/2008
Mary, Nabokov's first novel, was first published in the early 20s when he was living in exile in Berlin and writing under the pseudonym of "V. Sirin". It was published as Mashenka and in the forward Nabokov says that he thought of using the diminutive of English equivalent for his title of the English translation which would have been Mariette but decided to use Mary instead. (The book is translated...
The Corner (Free subscription) | 06/09/2008
Nina Khrushcheva, great-grandaughter of (in the words of the friend who drew this to my attention) 'the old bolshie shoe-pounder,' writes engagingly about Bill Buckley and his old friend, and Swiss neighbor, Vladimir Nabokov, here.
kottke (Free subscription) | 06/04/2008
The New Yorker has some new fiction by Vladimir Nabokov that has never been published in English, a short story called Natasha . The story was recently uncovered and translated : Written around 1924, when Nabokov was in his mid-twenties (five years after his family fled Russia, and two years after his father was assassinated in Berlin), it was discovered in the writer's archives at the Library of...
the Literary Saloon (Free subscription) | 06/03/2008
The current issue of The New Yorker has a new (from ca. 1924, but previously unpublished in English) story by Vladimir Nabokov, Natasha.
Condalmo (Free subscription) | 06/02/2008
The New Yorker has its summer fiction 2008 issue lineup, with a story by Vladimir Nabokov (update: never before published in English, according to MN), and contributions by Annie Proulx, Haruki Murakami, Tobias Wolff, and George Saunders. The newest podcast (subscribe here) features VN's "Signs and Symbols." Love the cover.
bookofjoe (Free subscription) | 06/02/2008
This story was written by Nabokov around 1924, early in his career. Today's it's being published for the first time in English, in the summer fiction issue of the New Yorker. Mirabile dictu, it appears on the New Yorker website...
MediaBistro.com (Free subscription) | 06/02/2008
On newsstands today is the June 9 & 16, 2008, Summer Fiction Issue of The New Yorker which features the story "Natasha", by Vladimir Nabokov, published for the first time in English. Written around 1924, when Nabokov was in his mid-twenties (five years after his family fled Russia, and two years after his father was assassinated in Berlin), it was discovered in the writer's archives at the Library...
