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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...
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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.
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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,…
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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...
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NEWSPEAK Blog (Free subscription) | 05/29/2008
The following books have been suggested for our first read. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory? Cormack McCarthy - The Road or The Crossing Dennis Johnson - Tree of Smoke I haven't read any of these...
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Languagehat.com (Free subscription) | 05/26/2008
From the preface to May Sarton's The Fur Person : Before Judy and I moved to 14 Wright St. in Cambridge, we lived for a few years in the early 1950s in a rented house at 9 Maynard Place. When Judy had a sabbatical leave, we sublet to Vladimir Nabokov and his beautiful wife, Vera, and they were delighted to accept Tom Jones as a cherished paying guest during their stay. What a bonanza for a gentleman...
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Seth's blog (Free subscription) | 05/19/2008
In the afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov tells the entirely fictional story that the book was inspired by a newspaper story about an ape who was taught to draw. The first thing “the poor creature” drew was the bars of its cage, Nabokov wrote. I would have preferred the artless truth, but I have to [...]
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The House Next Door (Free subscription) | 05/19/2008
By Keith Uhlich I finished Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire two days ago, which prompts me to think about the killing power of words. Not out of nowhere: the germ of the idea was there earlier this week when I published a Florence Nightingale quote on Links for the Day. Here again: “You ask me why I do not write something… I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words, they ought all to be
