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Book Nabokov s Butterfly and Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books

Download or read book Nabokov s Butterfly and Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books written by R. A. Gekoski and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collector of rare books shares his personal experiences with twenty important volumes and other literary items, including a signed copy of Sylvia Plath's The Colossus, a copy of Nabokov's Lolita from Graham Greene, and the sale of J. R. R. Tolkien's college gown.

Book Nabokov s Butterfly

    Book Details:
  • Author : Rick Gekoski
  • Publisher : Da Capo Press
  • Release : 2006-06-22
  • ISBN : 9780786716548
  • Pages : 240 pages

Download or read book Nabokov s Butterfly written by Rick Gekoski and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2006-06-22 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A first edition of Ulysses sold for 460,000 in auction at Christie's in 2002. The price might have upset the union chief, convicted gangster, and major-league James Joyce book collector Dennis Silverman, who had sold his copy, signed and inscribed by the author, for a mere 135,000 ten years earlier. Great books attract all kinds and come to fascinating destinies of their own, as Nabokov's Butterfly amply demonstrates. Here, noted author and rare book dealer Rick Gekoski — whose vocation led to the BBC radio series titled Rare Books, Rare People, — profiles twenty editions of major books that have passed through his hands and made publishing history, as they have become the legends of rare book collectors. Sued by J. D. Salinger, harassed by Harold Pinter, berated by Ted Hughes who unloaded his personal and passionately inscribed copy of Sylvia Plath's The Colossus, Gekoski is a convivial participant in these histories, including his sale of Mr. Tolkien's college gown. He recalls one day purchasing from Graham Greene his first edition of Lolita, with Nabokov's signature drawing of a butterfly inside, and on the next day he sold it to Elton John's lyricist at a 10,000 profit.

Book Nabokov s Butterflies

Download or read book Nabokov s Butterflies written by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 820 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Literature and Lepidoptera dance an elaborate pas de deux through seventy years of Vladimir Nabokov's life, from his boyhood in Russia to his life as an emigre in the Crimea, Berlin, France, the United States, and finally in Switzerland. An American literary giant, Nabokov also produced first-rate work as a scientist, and in his fiction and elsewhere eloquently advocated attention to the details of the natural world and promoted the delights of discovery." "Nabokov's Butterflies presents Nabokov's twin passions through an astonishingly rich array of novel selections, stories, poems, screenplay, autobiography, criticism, lecturers, articles, reviews, interviews, letters, and notes, plus a wealth of beautiful and fanciful drawings by Nabokov and photographs of him in the field."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Book Nabokov in America

Download or read book Nabokov in America written by Robert Roper and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born to an eminent Russian family, Vladimir Nabokov came to America fleeing the Nazis and remembered his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, his best work flowed from his response to this storied land. With charm and insight, Robert Roper fills out this period in the writer's life: his friendship with Edmund Wilson, his time at Cornell, his role at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. But Nabokov in America finds its narrative heart in his and his family's serial sojourns into the West. Roper has mined fresh sources to bring detail to these journeys, and traces their significant influence in Nabokov's work: on two-lane highways and in late-'40s motels and cafés, we feel Lolita draw near, and understand Nabokov's seductive familiarity with the American mundane. Nabokov in America is also a love letter to U.S. literature, in Nabokov's broad embrace of it from Melville to the Beats. Reading Roper, we feel anew the rich learning and the Romantic mind behind some of Nabokov's most beloved books.

Book Insomniac Dreams

Download or read book Insomniac Dreams written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First publication of an index-card diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams and subsequent daytime episodes, allowing the reader a glimpse of his innermost life.

Book Letters to V  ra

Download or read book Letters to V ra written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The letters of the great writer to his wife—gathered here for the first time—chronicle a decades-long love story and document anew the creative energies of an artist who was always at work. 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 in 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 form a narrative arc that tells a half-century-long love story, one that is playful, romantic, pithy and memorable. At the same time, the letters tell us much about the man and the writer. We see the infectious fascination with which Vladimir observed everything—animals, people, speech, the landscapes and cityscapes he encountered—and learn of the poems, plays, stories, novels, memoirs, screenplays and translations on which he worked ceaselessly. This delicious volume contains twenty-one photographs, as well as facsimiles of the letters themselves and the puzzles and doodles Vladimir often sent to Véra.

Book Nabokov s Butterflies

Download or read book Nabokov s Butterflies written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Beacon Press (MA). This book was released on 2000-05 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unpublished and Uncollected WritingsEdited and Annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael PyleNew Translations from the Russian by Dmitri NabokovLiterature and Lepidoptera dance an elaborate pas de deux through seventy years of Vladimir Nabokov's life, from his boyhood in Russia to his life as an émigré in the Crimea, Berlin, France, the United States, and finally in Switzerland. An American literary giant, Nabokov also produced first-rate work as a scientist, and in his fiction and elsewhere eloquently advocated attention to the details of the natural world and promoted the delights of discovery.Nabokov's Butterflies presents Nabokov's twin passions through an astonishingly rich array of novels, stories, poems, screenplay, autobiography, criticism, lectures, articles, reviews, interviews, letters, and notes, plus a wealth of beautiful and fanciful drawings by Nabokov and photographs of him in the field.Here for the first time, newly translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov, is Nabokov's most intense amalgam of literature and Lepidoptera, his forty-page afterword to The Gift-cut short by his switch from Russian to English and from Europe to America at the midpoint of his life-an immensely rich and revealing work. Here too are scores of fascinating letters to his mother, wife, and colleagues; the sui generis scientific articles; "The Admirable Anglewing," an intriguing entomological tale; a taste of the prodigious work he expended on his ultimately unrealized Butterflies of Europe; and ten poems newly translated from the original Russian.Nabokov's Butterflies is a major literary event: not only in chronological scope but also in genre no other volume of Nabokov's writing encompasses such variety. It is, as Dmitri Nabokov claims, a book that "would have warmed the cockles of Father's heart," and a must-have for admirers of the great novelist and all who appreciate the joys of Lepidoptera.

Book Nabokov s Blues

Download or read book Nabokov s Blues written by Kurt Johnson and published by Schaum's Outline Series. This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1940s Vladimir Nabokov was an acknowldged experts in Blues, a diverse group of Latin American butterflies. This book, which is part biography, explores the worldwide crisis in biodiversity and the place of butterflies in Nabokov's fiction.

Book The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Download or read book The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers and intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

Book Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire

Download or read book Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire written by José Manuel Prieto and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire was acclaimed by The Hartford Courant as "a thrilling discovery ... a reversal of the letters [of] Saul Bellow's Herzog ... [with] a Nabokovian delight in words and texts." J. is a smuggler living in Russia, making his living fencing the flotsam of communism's collapse. In Istanbul he takes a commission to trap an endangered Russian butterfly and decides to use it as an opportunity to smuggle V., his Russian lover who has no papers, back into her homeland. In the port of Odessa, she disappears, and J. continues alone to a small village on the Black Sea. Letters from V. begin to arrive, and as J. hunts the butterfly, he seeks a way to lure V. back into his life. Equal parts bittersweet love story, international intrigue, and one man's quest to write the perfect love letter, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, wrote The Tennessean, is "an amazing jewel of a story ... that winks with wit [and] wears its astonishing craftsmanship lightly." "An aesthetically blissful reading experience ... Nabokov's spirit, alive and kind, has touched [Prieto] with its butterfly wings." -- Aleksandar Hemon, The Village Voice Literary Supplement "...Nocturnal Butterflies is an impressive performance by a writer whose gifts are clearly abundant." -- Richard Bernstein, The New York Times "A beautiful, lavish, seedy, poetic, and magical book.... Pure pleasure for the literary mind." -- Chris Kridler, The Baltimore Sun

Book Vladimir Nabokov in Context

Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov in Context written by David Bethea and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vladimir Nabokov, bilingual writer of dazzling masterpieces, is a phenomenon that both resists and requires contextualization. This book challenges the myth of Nabokov as a sole genius who worked in isolation from his surroundings, as it seeks to anchor his work firmly within the historical, cultural, intellectual and political contexts of the turbulent twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov in Context maps the ever-changing sites, people, cultures and ideologies of his itinerant life which shaped the production and reception of his work. Concise and lively essays by leading scholars reveal a complex relationship of mutual influence between Nabokov's work and his environment. Appealing to a wide community of literary scholars this timely companion to Nabokov's writing offers new insights and approaches to one of the most important, and yet most elusive writers of modern literature.

Book Rare Books Uncovered

Download or read book Rare Books Uncovered written by Rebecca Rego Barry and published by Voyageur Press (MN). This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Discoveries of rare and collectible books are chronicled in stories from both casual and die-hard book collectors" --

Book The Art of Fiction

Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by David Lodge and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

Book The Enchanter  Nabokov and Happiness

Download or read book The Enchanter Nabokov and Happiness written by Lila Azam Zanganeh and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-05-02 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discovering happiness in reading the work of an extraordinary writer. The protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift playfully dreamed of writing "A Practical Handbook: How to Be Happy." Now, Nabokov's own creative reader Lila Azam Zanganeh lends life to this vision with sly sophistication and ebullient charm, as she shares the delirious joy to be found in reading the masterpieces of "the great writer of happiness." Plunging into the enchanted and luminous worlds of Speak, Memory; Ada, or Ardor; and the infamous Lolita, Azam Zanganeh seeks out the Nabokovian experience of time, memory, sexual passion, nature, loss, love in all its forms, and language in all its allusions. She explores Nabokov's geography-from his Russian childhood to the landscapes of "his" America-suffers encounters with his beloved "nature," hallucinates an interview with the master, and seeks the "crunch of happiness" in his singular vocabulary. This beautifully illuminated book will both reignite the passion of experienced Nabokovians and lure the innocent reader to a well of delights as yet unseen.

Book Pnin

    Book Details:
  • Author : Vladimir Nabokov
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2011-02-16
  • ISBN : 0307787478
  • Pages : 207 pages

Download or read book Pnin written by Vladimir Nabokov and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-02-16 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. 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. “Fun and satire are just the beginning of the rewards of this novel. Generous, bewildered Pnin, that most kindly and impractical of men, wins our affection and respect.” —Chicago Tribune Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian émigré precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunder-standings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator. 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.

Book Being Lolita

Download or read book Being Lolita written by Alisson Wood and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark relationship evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher in this breathtakingly powerful memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story. “Have you ever read Lolita?” So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson’s metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing—and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North. Mr. North gives Alisson a copy of Lolita to read, telling her it is a beautiful story about love. The book soon becomes the backdrop to a connection that blooms from a simple crush into a forbidden romance. But as Mr. North’s hold on her tightens, Alisson is forced to evaluate how much of their narrative is actually a disturbing fiction. In the wake of what becomes a deeply abusive relationship, Alisson is faced again and again with the story of her past, from rereading Lolita in college to working with teenage girls to becoming a professor of creative writing. It is only with that distance and perspective that she understands the ultimate power language has had on her—and how to harness that power to tell her own true story. Being Lolita is a stunning coming-of-age memoir that shines a bright light on our shifting perceptions of consent, vulnerability, and power. This is the story of what happens when a young woman realizes her entire narrative must be rewritten—and then takes back the pen to rewrite it.