Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
Author
Series
Library of America volume 88
Publisher
Literary Classics of the United States
Pub. Date
c1996
Language
English
Author
Series
Library of America volume 87
Publisher
Literary Classics of the United States
Pub. Date
c1996
Language
English
8) Pnin
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.
10) Despair: a novel
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
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.
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
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.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
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.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
As a young publisher, Hugh Person is sent to Switzerland to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian, and returns to New York with his bride. Eight years later, following a murder, a period of madness, and brief imprisonment, Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past.
16) Mary: a novel
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Lyrical prose records a young Russian exile's recollections of his first love affair.
17) Bend sinister
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
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 and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.