Vladimir Nabokov

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Virginia

Nabokov's parody, half poem and half commentary on the poem, deals with the escapades of the deposed king of Zemala in a New England college town

Pale Fire

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Vladímir Nabokov

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Arizona

The Annotated Lolita

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Revised and Updated

The textural discussion accompanying this novel examines the thematic and technical elements which make it a literary classic

Colorado

A Family Chronicle

Set in a "dreambright" America, at the turn of the century, the novel depicts an incestuous love affair

Ada, or Ardor

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Published 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. But more: 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.

Michigan

Like 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.

Invitation to a Beheading

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Depicts the struggles of Timofey Pnin, a professor of Russian, who attempts to adapt himself to life at an institution.

Pnin

Vintage paperback edition from 1989, first printing.

An Autobiography Revisited

This book, first published in 1951 as Conclusive evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, examines Nabokov's life and times while offering incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The gift, The real life of Sebastian Knight, and The defense.

Speak, Memory

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John Banville

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.

Laughter in the Dark

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"Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster." Thus begins Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark; this, the author tells us, is the whole story--except that he starts from here, with his characteristic dazzling skill and irony, and brilliantly turns a fable into a chilling, original novel of folly and destruction. Amidst a Weimar-era milieu of silent film stars, artists, and aspirants, Nabokov creates a merciless masterpiece as Albinus, an aging critic, falls prey to his own desires, to his teenage mistress, and to Axel Rex, the scheming rival for her affections who finds his greatest joy in the downfall of others.



Published first in Russian as Kamera Obskura in 1932, this book appeared in Nabokov's own English translation six years later. This New Directions edition, based on the text as Nabokov revised it in 1960, features a new introduction by Booker Prize-winner John Banville.

Connecticut

A collection of 65 stories about human relations, human nature, and political satire includes 13 first-time English translations

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

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Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after its original publication--Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder.

Despair

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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

Letters to Véra

The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic.nbsp;nbsp;While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. It is first and foremost a compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.nbsp;nbsp;Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.nbsp;nbsp;In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime.

Bend Sinister

The novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men's clothing emporium store.nbsp;nbsp;Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife Martha.nbsp;nbsp;Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle's condescension in his aunt's bed.

King, Queen, Knave

Luzhin's prodigious talent at chess earns him the title of grandmaster, but his passion soon leads to obsession, and his world falls apart during a championship match when his defense fades under his opponent's surprising strategy.

The Luzhin Defense

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A farcical detective story and a profoundly refractive tale about a Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indiginities in the afterlife. • A wonderfully layered exploration of the vicissitudes of identity, appearance, and the loss of self. Smurov, a lovelorn and excruciatingly self-conscious Russian tutor, shoots himself after a 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.

The Eye

The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov's classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.

The Enchanter

Probes the mind of a man whose unconscious sexual and destructive obsessions drive him to strangle his wife and escape into the Europe of his past

Transparent Things

Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov's dream diary, published for the first time--and placed in biographical and literary context

On October 14, 1964, Vladimir Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac, began a curious experiment. Over the next eighty days, immediately upon waking, he wrote down his dreams, following the instructions he found in An Experiment with Time by the British philosopher John Dunne. The purpose was to test the theory that time may go in reverse, so that, paradoxically, a later event may generate an earlier dream. The result--published here for the first time--is a fascinating diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams (and subsequent daytime episodes) on 118 index cards, which afford a rare glimpse of the artist at his most private. More than an odd biographical footnote, the experiment grew out of Nabokov's passionate interest in the mystery of time, which influenced many of his novels, including the late masterpiece Ada.

Insomniac Dreams, edited by leading Nabokov authority Gennady Barabtarlo, presents the text of Nabokov's dream experiment, illustrated with a selection of his original index cards, and provides rich annotations and analysis that put them in the context of his life and writings. The book also includes previously unpublished records of Nabokov's dreams from his letters and notebooks and shows important connections between his fiction and private writings on dreams and time.

Insomniac Dreams

The protagonist relates the life of his half-brother, the novelist Sebastian Knight, in an effort to reveal his true character

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Aleksandr Pushkin

Alexander Pushkin

Johnston Bayley

Charles Johnston

A Novel in Verse

A translation of Pushkin's sober, elegant, witty, fluent, affable, graceful, sad novel in verse, Eugene Onegin.

Eugene Onegin

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A Novel in Verse: Text

"In an era of inept and ignorant imitations, whose piped-in background music has hypnotized innocent readers into fearing literality's salutary jolt, some reviewers were upset by the humble fidelity of my version. . . ." Such was Vladimir Nabokov's response to the storm of controversy aroused by the first edition of his literal translation of Eugene Onegin. This bold rendering of the Russian masterpiece, together with Nabokov's detailed and witty commentary, is itself a work of enduring literary interest, and reflects a lifelong admiration for Pushkin on the part of one of this century's most brilliant stylists.

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished e migre poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write--a book very much like The Gift itself.

The Gift

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Thomas Karshan

Anastasia Tolstoy

Traces the experiences of an incognito king whose love for a revolutionary's wife ignites the chaos he has fought to prevent, forcing him to confront the lines between truth and fantasy.

The Tragedy of Mr. Morn

In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects.nbsp;nbsp;Strong Opinions offers his trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita.

Strong Opinions

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Vintage International paperback edition from 1989.

Mary is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia--Nabokov's first novel.nbsp;nbsp;In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair.nbsp;nbsp;His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia.nbsp;nbsp;In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia.

Mary

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Lolita / Lolita (screenplay) / Pnin / Pale Fire

Lolita - Pnin - Pale Fire - Lolita: A Screen Play.

Browse by categories

Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov

The Annotated Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

Ada, or Ardor

Vladimir Nabokov

Invitation to a Beheading

Vladimir Nabokov

Pnin

Vladimir Nabokov

Speak, Memory

Vladimir Nabokov

Laughter in the Dark

Vladímir Nabokov

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Despair

Vladimir Nabokov

Letters to Véra

Vladimir Nabokov

Bend Sinister

Vladimir Nabokov

King, Queen, Knave

Vladimir Nabokov

The Luzhin Defense

Vladimir Nabokov

The Eye

Vladimir Nabokov

The Enchanter

Vladimir Nabokov

Transparent Things

Vladimir Nabokov

Insomniac Dreams

Vladimir Nabokov

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Aleksandr Pushkin

Eugene Onegin

Vladímir Nabokov

The Gift

Vladímir Nabokov

The Tragedy of Mr. Morn

Vladimir Nabokov

Strong Opinions

Vladimir Nabokov

Mary

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955-1962 (LOA #88)