Vladimir Nabokov

The novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men's clothing emporium store.Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife Martha.Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the myopic...

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...

From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, and so many others, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov's...

Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically. -- John UpdikeThe Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story -- subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax -- about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about Sebastian Knight as a distinguished...

A Family ChroniclePublished 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...

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the greatest modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions. It was Nabokovs gift to bring paradise wherever he alighted. John Updike, The New York Review of BooksNovelist, poet, critic, translator, and, above all, a peerless imaginer, Vladimir Nabokov was arguably the...