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books tagged “vladimir nabokov”
books tagged “vladimir nabokov”
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Ada: Or, Ardor a Family Chronicleby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679725229 (0-679-72522-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ada or Ardor a Family Chronicle'Book summary:On the country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Van Veen meets Ada, his beautiful cousin. Their relationship flourishes, but both were born into one of America's illustrious families, a vast over-extended empire, and this causes problems for the lovers. [via]
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The Annotated Lolitaby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Annotated Lolita'Book summary:In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"
The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats." [via]
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Bend Sinisterby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679727272 (0-679-72727-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bend Sinister'Book summary:The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and com- pelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the countrys foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the gov- ernment attempts to co-opt Krugs support in order to validate the new regime. One of the twentieth centurys master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically. John Updike [via]
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The Defense: A Novelby Michael Scammell, Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokvovISBN 0679727221 (0-679-72722-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Defense: A Novel'Book summary:Nabokov'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. [via]
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Defenseby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0399500634 (0-399-50063-4)
Softcover, Perigee
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Despairby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723439 (0-679-72343-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Enchanterby Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0679728864 (0-679-72886-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Eugene Oneginby Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Tom BeckISBN 1903517281 (1-903517-28-1)
Softcover, Dedalus Ltd
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eugene Onegin'Book summary:"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.
[via]More editions of Eugene Onegin:
- Eugene Onegin: ISBN 0486404234 (0-486-40423-4)
Softcover, Dover Pubns - Eugene Onegin: ISBN 0691019053 (0-691-01905-3)
Softcover, Princeton Univ Pr - Yevgeny Onegin: ISBN 0460875957 (0-460-87595-7)
Softcover, Tuttle Pub - Eugene Onegin: ISBN 0670298891 (0-670-29889-1)
Hardcover, Viking Press - Eugene Onegin: ISBN 071007333X (0-7100-7333-X)
Hardcover, Routledge and Kegan Paul - Eugene Onegin: ISBN 0809316307 (0-8093-1630-7)
Hardcover, Southern Illinois Univ Pr - Eugene Onegin: ISBN 1903517281 (1-903517-28-1)
Softcover, Dedalus Ltd
- Eugene Onegin: ISBN 0486404234 (0-486-40423-4)
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Eugene Oneginby Douglas R. Hofstadter, Aleksandr Sergeevich PushkinISBN 0465020941 (0-465-02094-1)
Softcover, Perseus Books Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eugene Onegin'Book summary:The supreme poet of the Russian language, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin has had a checkered existence in English. His prose, to be sure, has presented his translators with a less formidable set of hurdles. But Pushkin composed his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, in a 14-line stanza of his own invention, with a slippery rhyme scheme and treacherously foursquare meter (i.e., iambic tetrameter, which tends to sound slightly singsong to English speakers). This has forced most of his translators--from Walter Arndt to James Falen to Charles Johnston--to shortchange form in favor of content. Vladimir Nabokov probably pushed this tendency as far as it could go, transforming Pushkin's poetry into perversely lumpy paragraphs (and enveloping the slim pickings of his translation in a jumbo-sized commentary). But nobody has managed to produce even a halfway-definitive version of Eugene Onegin.
Now Douglas Hofstadter, who's best known for Gödel, Escher, Bach, has taken a shot at it. Certainly he's no stranger to translation theory--his 1997 book, Le Ton Beau de Marot, was a brilliant and unbuttoned meditation on the translator's art, with numerous detours into the hinterlands of cognitive science. Theory and practice are two different matters, however, as Hofstadter is quick to admit: "The thought seemed quite ridiculous: me, with such sparse knowledge of Russian, hoping to clamber up this formidable Everest of translation, a book often said to be next to untranslatable, and square at the center of the inner circle of Russian literature!" Clamber he did, however--and the result is a charming if uneven version of the poem, more beholden to Cole Porter and Ogden Nash than the poet's 19th-century peers. Several of Hofstadter's slangier couplets might have Nabokov spinning in his grave: "Did thus our party boy exhaust / Himself at games, at zero cost?" Still, he manages some of Pushkin's loop-the-loops very nicely:
The air grew warm as days went flying,
Clearly Hofstadter's take on the poem goes heavy on the sizzle and fails to capture much of Pushkin's elegant gravity. Still, it's a welcome addition to the ranks, a handsome present to the poet on the occasion of his 200th birthday--and, rather winningly, a linguistic labor of love. --William Davies [via]
And winter knew to call it quits.
Eugene gave up his versifying,
But not the ghost, and not his wits.
He's lent new life by buds aborning,
And first thing on some clear spring morning
He leaves his cloistered, small château
Where, marmot-like, he'd braved the snow.
Eugene Oneginby Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Aleksandr Sergeevich PushkinISBN 0691018375 (0-691-01837-5)
Softcover, Princeton Univ Pr
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Eugene Oneginby Walter W. Arndt, Aleksandr Sergeevich PushkinISBN 0875011063 (0-87501-106-3)
Softcover, Ardis
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eugene Onegin'Book summary:This is the widely acclaimed translation of Russian literature's most seminal work. Pushkin's "novel in verse" has influenced Russian prose as well as poetry for more than a century. By turns brilliant, entertaining, romantic and serious, it traces the development of a young Petersburg dandy as he deals with life and love. Influeneced by Byron, Pushkin reveals the nature of his heroes through the emotional colorations found in their witty remarks, nature descriptions, and unexpected actions, all conveyed in stanzas of sonnet length (a form which became known as the Onegin Stanza), faithfully reproduced by Walter Arndt inthis Bollingen Prize translation. [via]
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The Eyeby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 067972723X (0-679-72723-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Eye'Book summary:Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Nabokov's protagonist, Smurov, is a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin, who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife. [via]
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The Giftby Vladimir Nabokov, Michael ScammelISBN 0679727256 (0-679-72725-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gift'Book summary:For most of his life, Vladimir Nabokov was quite literally a man without a country. It's a small irony, then, that his career falls so neatly into national phases: Russian, German, French, and American, plus the protracted coda he spend in a Swiss luxury hotel during his final decade. The Gift, which he wrote between 1935 and 1937 in Berlin, is the grand summation of his second phase. It describes, for starters, the sentimental education of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev. This hyphenated creation has more than a few things in common with the author, despite Nabokov's vehement denial in the novel's foreword. Still, only a nitwit would read The Gift for its autobiographical revelations. What this early masterpiece does offer is a wealth of lyrical, witty, heartbreaking prose, beautifully translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell (with an assist from Nabokov himself). Who else would note the way a street rises "at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel"? Who else has ever administered the satirical shiv to his characters with such deadly, almost affectionate aplomb?
Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes--which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot.
Of course, only a fraction of The Gift is taken up with this sort of demolition derby. Fyodor's romance with Zina, for example, occasions the most ardent prose of Nabokov's career: "And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them." (Shades of Volodya and Véra? Only the deceased husband and wife, and perhaps Stacy Schiff, know for sure.)At the same time, The Gift is a brilliant, mesmerizing riff on the history of Russian literature, with elaborate bouquets tossed to Pushkin and Gogol. There's also a hilarious yet somehow tender evisceration of the do-gooding polemicist Nikolai Chernyshevski--which was suppressed, in fact, when the novel was originally serialized by a Russian émigré magazine. As should be clear by now, The Gift defies any attempt at quick-and-dirty summary. But the book plays the most pleasurable kind of havoc with our stuffy notions of narrative structure and linguistic protocol. And as Nabokov repeatedly wraps the reader's consciousness around his little finger, he never holds back on that ultimate literary gift: pleasure. --James Marcus [via]
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Gloryby Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0679727248 (0-679-72724-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Glory'Book summary:A novel by the author of "Mary", "The Eye", "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight", "Transparent Things" and "Lolita". [via]
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Invitation to a Beheadingby Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0679725318 (0-679-72531-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Invitation to a Beheading'Book summary: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. [via]
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Laughter in the Darkby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679724508 (0-679-72450-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Laughter in the Dark'Book summary: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. [via]
Laughter in the Darkby Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, John BanvilleISBN 0811216748 (0-8112-1674-8)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc
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Lectures on Literatureby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0156027755 (0-15-602775-5)
Softcover, Harcourt
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lectures on Literature'Book summary:For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.[via] -
Lectures on Literature: British, French and German Writersby Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Fredson BowersISBN 0151495971 (0-15-149597-1)
Hardcover, Harcourt Education
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lectures on Literature: British, French and German Writers'Book summary:For two decades, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, Nabokov introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction. Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.[via]More editions of Lectures on Literature: British, French and German Writers:
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Lectures on Russian Literatureby Vladimir Nabokov, Fredson Bowers, Simon KarlinskyISBN 0156027763 (0-15-602776-3)
Softcover, Harvest Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lectures on Russian Literature'Book summary:The authors observations on the great nineteenth-century Russian writers-Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. This volume... never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians (Anthony Burgess). Edited and with an Introduction by Fredson Bowers; illustrations.[via]More editions of Lectures on Russian Literature:
Living Without a Goal : Finding the Freedom to Live a Creative, Innovative and Fulfilled Lifeby James OgilvyISBN 0385417993 (0-385-41799-3)
Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing
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Lolitaby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723161 (0-679-72316-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lolita'Book summary:Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:
She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via]More editions of Lolita:
- Lolita: ISBN 0679772553 (0-679-77255-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc - Lolita: ISBN 0822206838 (0-8222-0683-8)
Softcover, Dramatist's Play Service - Lolita: ISBN 0297819100 (0-297-81910-0)
Hardcover, Orion Publishing Group, Limited - Lolita: ISBN 0679410430 (0-679-41043-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc - Lolita: ISBN 0425099601 (0-425-09960-1)
Softcover, Berkley Pub Group - Lolita: ISBN 0676514197 (0-676-51419-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc - Lolita: ISBN 0882332287 (0-88233-228-7)
Softcover, Ardis - Lolita: ISBN 0517388081 (0-517-38808-1)
Hardcover, Greenwich House - Lolita: ISBN 0783880804 (0-7838-8080-4)
Hardcover, G K Hall & Co - Lolita: ISBN 0679723161 (0-679-72316-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
- Lolita: ISBN 0679772553 (0-679-77255-3)
Lolitaby Harold BloomISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
Hardcover, Facts on File
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The Magician's Doubtsby Michael WoodISBN 0691048304 (0-691-04830-4)
Softcover, Princeton Univ Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Magician's Doubts'Book summary:As a child in Russia, Vladimir Nabokov enjoyed conjuring: "I loved doing simple tricks--turning water into wine, that kind of thing." In this engrossing book Michael Wood explores the blend of arrogance and mischief that makes Nabokov such a fascinating and elusive master of fiction. Wood argues that Nabokov is neither the aesthete he liked to pretend to be nor the heavy-handed moralist recent critics make him. Major works like Pnin, Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada appear in a new light, but there are also chapters on earlier works, like the Real Life of Sebastian Knight; on selected short stories; and on the translation of Eugene Onegin, as well as detailed discussions of Nabokov's ideas of literature, memory, pity, and pain.
The book comes fully to terms with Nabokov's blend of playfulness and seriousness, delving into the real delight of reading him and the odd disquiet that lurks beneath that pleasure. Wood's speculations spin outward to illuminate the ambiguities and aspirations of the modern novel, and to raise the question of how we uncover "the author" in a work, without falling into the obvious biographical traps. The Magician's Doubts slices through the dustier conventions of criticism and never loses sight of the emotional and sensual pleasure of reading. [via]
Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributesby Charles Newman, Alfred AppelISBN 0810102927 (0-8101-0292-7)
Hardcover, Northwestern University Press
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Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Geniusby Kurt Johnson, Steven L. CoatesISBN 1581950098 (1-58195-009-8)
Hardcover, Zoland Books
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Nabokov's Butterfliesby Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd, Robert Michael Pyle, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0807085421 (0-8070-8542-1)
Hardcover, Beacon Press
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Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writingsby Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd, Robert M. Pyle, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0807085405 (0-8070-8540-5)
Hardcover, Beacon Press
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings'Book summary:Newly translated works by Nabokov on the twin passions of his life, literature and lepidoptera. A rich array of never-before-seen Nabokovia: novels, stories, poems, autobiography, interviews, diaries, and more, plus scientific and fanciful drawings by Nabokov and photographs of him in the field. The text--the richest and most varied assemblage of Nabokov's writing's available--is arranged chronologically and introduced by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle [via]
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Pale Fireby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723420 (0-679-72342-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pale Fire'Book summary:Like Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a masterpiece that imprisons us inside the mazelike head of a mad émigré. Yet Pale Fire is more outrageously hilarious, and its narrative convolutions make the earlier book seem as straightforward as a fairy tale. Here's the plot--listen carefully! John Shade is a homebody poet in New Wye, U.S.A. He writes a 999-line poem about his life, and what may lie beyond death. This novel (and seldom has the word seemed so woefully inadequate) consists of both that poem and an extensive commentary on it by the poet's crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote.
According to this deranged annotator, he had urged Shade to write about his own homeland--the northern kingdom of Zembla. It soon becomes clear that this fabulous locale may well be a figment of Kinbote's colorfully cracked, prismatic imagination. Meanwhile, he manages to twist the poem into an account of Zembla's King Charles--whom he believes himself to be--and the monarch's eventual assassination by the revolutionary Jakob Gradus.
In the course of this dizzying narrative, shots are indeed fired. But it's Shade who takes the hit, enabling Kinbote to steal the dead poet's manuscript and set about annotating it. Is that perfectly clear? By now it should be obvious that Pale Fire is not only a whodunit but a who-wrote-it. There isn't, of course, a single solution. But Nabokov's best biographer, Brian Boyd, has come up with an ingenious suggestion: he argues that Shade is actually guiding Kinbote's mad hand from beyond the grave, nudging him into completing what he'd intended to be a 1,000-line poem. Read this magical, melancholic mystery and see if you agree. --Tim Appelo [via]
More editions of Pale Fire:
- Pale Fire: ISBN 0679410775 (0-679-41077-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc - Pale Fire: ISBN 0399504583 (0-399-50458-3)
Softcover, Perigee - Pale Fire: ISBN 0425093220 (0-425-09322-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated - Pale Fire: ISBN 0399121617 (0-399-12161-7)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group - Pale Fire: ISBN 0679723420 (0-679-72342-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
- Pale Fire: ISBN 0679410775 (0-679-41077-5)
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Pninby Vladimir Nabokov, David LodgeISBN 1400041988 (1-4000-4198-8)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pnin'Book summary:Initially an almost grotesquely comic figure, Pnin gradually grows in stature by contrast with those who laugh at him. Whether taking the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he has not mastered or throwing a faculty party during which he learns he is losing his job, the gently preposterous hero of this enchanting novel evokes the reader's deepest protective instinct. Serialized in The New Yorker and published in book form in 1957, PNIN brought Nabokov both his first National Book Award nomination and hitherto unprecedented popularity. [via]
More editions of Pnin:
- Pnin: ISBN 1857152727 (1-85715-272-7)
Hardcover, Alfred A. Knopf - Pnin: ISBN 0679723412 (0-679-72341-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books - Pnin: ISBN 0837604656 (0-8376-0465-6)
Hardcover, Bentley Pub - Pnin: ISBN 0385191162 (0-385-19116-2)
Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group - Pnin: ISBN 1400041988 (1-4000-4198-8)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
- Pnin: ISBN 1857152727 (1-85715-272-7)
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Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Booksby Azar NafisiISBN 081297106X (0-8129-7106-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books'Book summary:An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color." Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes.
Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: "There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom," she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive. --Shawn Carkonen [via]
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knightby Vladimir Nabokov, C. BrennerISBN 0811203271 (0-8112-0327-1)
Hardcover, New Directions Publishing Corporation
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Real Life of Sebastian Knightby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0679727264 (0-679-72726-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Sobranie Sochinenii: Darby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0882335340 (0-88233-534-0)
Hardcover, Ardis
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Speak, Memoryby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723390 (0-679-72339-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Speak, Memory'Book summary:Even if you already own Nabokov's earthy, otherworldly account of his astounding life, you must buy this 1999 edition. And if you've never read Speak, Memory, you must do so at once. This volume is essential because it includes the unpublished last chapter, a pseudo-review comparing Speak, Memory with another, nonexistent memoir called When Lilacs Last. (That title refers to Whitman's poem on Lincoln's assassination and to the lilacs of Nabokov's childhood home) Chapter 16 is a key to what the imaginary reviewer accurately calls a "unique freak as autobiographies go," revealing its novel-like nature and unifying themes and images (chess, puzzles, spirals, jewels, rainbows, exile, the stained-glass shadow patterns that the future casts on the present). Maybe Nabokov thought he gave too much away, and one sees the formal superiority of ending the book with chapter 15. But the added essay is a gem that dazzles and illuminates.
You have to consult biographies like Brian Boyd's for the full, remarkable facts of Nabokov's life. A millionaire at 17 (his sister danced in Diaghilev gowns with Fabergé gems at the Winter Palace), repeatedly exiled, forced to bust out of one chrysalis after another into new lives, the writer retained only the infinite wealth of his memory and art. This book is a mosaic shaped by a mind so metaphorical that, as a babe, Nabokov perceived letters as colors, the alphabet as a rainbow.
The loss of his father is at Speak, Memory's core. This memoir is worth owning for a single paragraph alone, about the sight of Nabokov senior being tossed aloft by grateful peasants he'd been generous to--a dozen or so with locked arms flinging him up in a hip-hip-hooray ritual.
There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawled in midair.... Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up ... and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.
Nabokov recaptures the paradise of his youth, and acquits himself of the coldness of which some accuse him. He plays literary games, but he plays for keeps. --Tim Appelo [via] 
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokovby Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0394586158 (0-394-58615-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokovby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0679729976 (0-679-72997-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov'Book summary:These stories, written between the early 1920s to the mid-1950s, reveal the fascinating progress of Nabokov's early development as they remind us that we are in the presence of a magnificent original, a genuine master. Edited by his son and translator, Dmitri Nabokov, this volume is a literary event. [via]
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Strong Opinionsby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0679726098 (0-679-72609-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Transparent Thingsby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0679725415 (0-679-72541-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): A Biographyby Stacy SchiffISBN 0375755349 (0-375-75534-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): A Biography'Book summary:She was wearing a black satin mask when they first met in 1923, and in a sense she wore a mask--that of the dutiful wife and helpmeet--throughout their 52-year marriage. Especially after the American publication of Lolita made her husband notorious in 1958, Véra Nabokov's presence at her husband's side was crucial, writes her biographer Stacy Schiff: "[It] kept the fiction in its place, reassured readers ... that Nabokov's perversities were of a different kind." But Véra Slonim (1902-91) was essential to Vladimir Nabokov's literary career from the beginning. She had a gift for handling practical matters that her spouse proudly lacked; she screened him from his publishers and his admirers with equal firmness, and in doing so she liberated him to fulfill the artistic genius they both believed he possessed. Praised for a previous biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Schiff here cements her reputation as a literary biographer of striking subtlety and perceptiveness. She establishes a strong base in chapter 1 with her excellent analysis of Véra Slonim's youth in a privileged Russian Jewish family in St. Petersburg. She then pursues her subject's elusive personality through hints in Nabokov's work and the comments of friends and colleagues. Schiff's elegant prose and eye for nuance nearly match Nabokov himself in this lucid, unsentimental portrait of a marriage. --Wendy Smith [via]
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Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) : Portrait of a Marriageby Stacy SchiffISBN 0679447903 (0-679-44790-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Vladimir Nabokovby Brian BoydISBN 1883011191 (1-883011-19-1)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Vladimir Nabokov'Book summary:This first major critical biography of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the greatest of 20th-century writers, finally allows us full access to the dramatic details of his life and the depths of his art. An intensely private man, Nabokov was uprooted first by the Russian Revolution and then by World War II. Transformed into a permanent wanderer, he did not achieve fame until late in life, with the success of "Lolita." In this first of two volumes, Brian Boyd vividly describes the liberal milieu of the aristocratic Nabokovs, their escape from Russia, Nabokov's education at Cambridge, and the murder of his father in Berlin. Boyd then turns to the years that Nabokov spent, impoverished, in Germany and France, until the coming of Hitler forced him to flee, with wife and son, to the U.S.
This volume stands on its own as a fascinating exploration of Nabokov's Russian years and Russian worlds, pre-revolutionary and emigre. In the course of his 10 years' work on the biography, Boyd traveled along Nabokov's trail everywhere from Yalta to Palo Alto. The only scholar to have had free access to the Nabokov archives in Montreux and the Library of Congress, he also interviewed at length Nabokov's family and scores of his friends and associates.
For the general reader, Boyd offers an introduction to Nabokov the man, his works, and his world. For the specialist, he provides a basis for all future research on Nabokov's life and art, as he dates and describes the composition of all Nabokov's works, published and unpublished. Boyd investigates Nabokov's relation to and his independence from his time, examines the special structures of his mind and thought, and explains the relations between his philosophy andhis innovations of literary strategy and style. At the same time he provides succinct introductions to all the fiction, dramas, memoirs, and major verse; presents detailed analyses of the major books that break new ground for the scholar, while providing easy paths into the works for other readers; and shows the relationship between Nabokov's life and the themes and subjects of his art. [via]
More editions of Vladimir Nabokov:
- Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years: ISBN 0691024707 (0-691-02470-7)
Softcover, Princeton Univ Pr - Vladimir Nabokov - The American Years: ISBN 0691024715 (0-691-02471-5)
Softcover, Princeton University Press - Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years: ISBN 0691067945 (0-691-06794-5)
Hardcover, Princeton Univ Pr - Vladimir Nabokov: ISBN 069106797X (0-691-06797-X)
Hardcover, Princeton Univ Pr - Vladimir Nabokov: ISBN 1883011191 (1-883011-19-1)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
- Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years: ISBN 0691024707 (0-691-02470-7)
Vladimir Nabokov, 1941-1951 Vol. 1: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight; Bend Sinister; Speak, Memoryby Vladimir Nabokov, Brian BoydISBN 1883011183 (1-883011-18-3)
Hardcover, Library of America, The
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Vn: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokovby Andrew FieldISBN 0517561131 (0-517-56113-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Placesby Peter NabokovISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places'Book summary:From the author of Native American Testimony comes a revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian
For thousands of years Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious locations in their homelands. In Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov offers sixteen "biographies of place" that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessees Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.Based on years of research and personal experience, Where the Lightning Strikes reveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth. [via]
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Writers at Workby George PlimptonISBN 0670790974 (0-670-79097-4)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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Spanish
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Ada O El Ardorby Vladimir NabokovISBN 8433920596 (84-339-2059-6)
Softcover, Ld Books Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ada O El Ardor'Book summary:Publicada por el autor a sus setenta años, esta novela supone el felicisimo apogeo de su larga y brillante carrera literaria. Al mismo tiempo que cronica familiar e historia de amor, es un tratado filosofico sobre la naturaleza del tiempo, una parodica historia del genero novelesco, una novela erotica, un canto al placer y una reivindicacion del Paraiso entendido como algo que no hay que buscar en el mas alla, sino en la Tierra. Aqui destaca por encima de todo la historia de encuentros y desencuentros entre los principales protagonistas, Van Veen y Ada, los dos hermanos que, creyendose solo primos, se enamoran pasionalmente con motivo de su encuentro adolescente en la finca familiar de Ardis y que ahora, con motivo del noventa y siete cumpleanos de Van, contemplan los distintos avatares de su amor. [via]
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Leer 'Lolita' En Teheran / Reading Lolita In Teheranby Azar NafisiISBN 8476696310 (84-7669-631-0)
Softcover, Oceano De Mexico
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Leer Lolita En Teheranby Azar NafisiISBN 8496333159 (84-96333-15-9)
Softcover, Planeta Pub Corp
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Lolitaby Vladimir Nabokov, Enrique TejedorISBN 8433920383 (84-339-2038-3)
Hardcover, Anagrama Editorial S. A.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lolita'Book summary:Esta es la historia de la obsesion de Humbert Humbert, un profesor cuarenton, por la doceañera Lolita. Es una extraordinaria novela de amor en la que intervienen dos componentes explosivos: la atraccion "perversa" por las ninfulas y el incesto. Narrada con autoironia y lirismo desenfrenado, es tambien un retrato acido y visionario de los Estados Unidos, de los horrores suburbanos y de la cultura del plastico y del motel. [via]
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Palido Fuegoby Nabokov V.ISBN 843392060X (84-339-2060-X)
Softcover, Ld Books Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Palido Fuego'Book summary:Esta es una obra maestra, una novela originalisima, desconcertante y diabolicamente divertida, que figura entre las preferidas de su propio autor. Es la edicion postuma de un largo poema escrito por John Shade, gloria de las letras norteamericanas, un poco antes de ser asesinado. Ademas, un prologo, un corpus de notas y un indice comentado del editor, el profesor Charles Kinbote. Mediante sus entrometidos comentarios sobre el poema, su amistad con Shade los meses anteriores a su muerte, y el lejano reino de Zembla, Kinbote va trazando un hilarante autorretaro, en el que se delata como un individuo intolerante y altivo, excentrico y perverso, un autentico y peligroso chiflado. [via]
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German
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Nabokovs Berlinby Dieter E. ZimmerISBN 387584095X (3-87584-095-X)
Hardcover, Nicolai
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nabokovs Berlin'Book summary:Schinkel - - Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Architektur, Malerei, Kunstgewerbe. Ausstellungskatalog, verzeichnet über 333 genau beschriebene Exponate. Mit einigen Textbeiträgen und sehr zahlreichen, z.T. ganzseitigen, z.T. farbigen Abbildungen. Bln, Orangerie des Schlosses Charlottenburg, 1981. 4°. 373,3 S. Ill. OKarton. 387584095X Bestell Nr.: 10668 20,00 ? Erste Ausgabe. Texte von Helmut Börsch-Supan, Lucius Grisebach, Hermann Grimm, Paul Ortwin Rave, Brigitte Stamm u.a. Im Anhang mit Lebensdaten und Werkliste, Literaturverzeichnis, Ortsregister der Bauten Schinkels und Personenregister. Bestellt hat der Kunde: Nabokovs Berlin. [Gebundene Ausgabe] [2001] Zimmer, Dieter E. Anmerkung zum Zustand: Erste Ausgabe. Texte von Helmut Börsch-Supan, Lucius Grisebach, Hermann Grimm, Paul Ortwin Rave, Brigitte Stamm u.a. Im Anhang mit Lebensdaten und Werkliste, Literaturverzeichnis, Ortsregister der Bauten Schinkels und Personenregister. [via]
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Russian
Evgenii Onegin: Roman V Stikhakhby Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, V. F. Khodasevich, Institut mirovoi literatury imeni A.M. Gorkogo, Mstislav Valerianovich DobuzhinskiiISBN 5201133533 (5-201-13353-3)
Hardcover, Nasledie
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