Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters To the

Emma — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

‘Masterly, hilarious, truly insightful’ – Philip Hensher, The Spectator

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2019

The last major collection of Nabokov’s published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously uncollected texts from across the author’s extraordinary career.

Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final, fascinating interviews given shortly before his death in 1977.

Introduced and edited by his biographer Brian Boyd, this is an essential work for anyone who has been drawn into Nabokov’s literary orbit. Here he is at his most inspirational, curious, playful, misleading and caustic. The seriousness of his aesthetic credo, his passion for great writing and his mix of delight and dismay at his own, sudden global fame in the 1950s are all brilliantly delineated.

Lolita

Emma — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

‘Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine’ Martin Amis, Observer

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, ‘to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets’. Is he in love or insane? A tortured soul or a monster? Humbert Humbert’s fixation is one of many dimensions in Nabokov’s dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962, and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne, Lolita has lost none of its power to shock and awe.

‘There’s no funnier monster in literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert’ Independent

Nabokov, Vladimir – The Bell Bookshop

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters To the

Lolita