From award-winning literary scholar Robert Alter, a masterful exploration of how Nabokov used artifice to evoke the dilemmas, pain, and exaltation of the human condition Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these illuminating and exquisitely written essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values. Offering timeless insights into literature’s most fabulous artificer, Nabokov and the Real World makes an elegant and compelling case for Nabokov's relevance today.

Nabokov's first novel in English, one of his greatest and most overlooked, with a new Introduction by Michael Dirda.

"This book collects book includes eleven pieces about Vladimir Nabokov. A common thread connects the articles, which is an underlying sense that Nabokov's fiction resonantly addresses the realm beyond literature that we call, perhaps for want of a better term-and it is a word toward which he himself was dismissive-reality. . . . Nabokov was an existentially serious writer in the midst of being a playful one. He cared deeply about human relationships and their potential distortions, about love and the pain it often entails, and about what was happening in the larger historical theater. He firmly resisted attachment to political parties and trends. Yet he was acutely sensitive to the ways in which political ideologies could pervert or destroy human values and powerfully registered this awareness in several of his novels. His fiction poignantly conveys the burden of loss with which many must live-the loss of loved ones, of moral certainties, of homeland, of language and familiar cultural setting. In what the author has written on Nabokov, he has sought to give this large dimension of Nabokov's novels and stories more attention than it has often received"--

A gripping true-crime investigation of the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner and how it inspired Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time, selling over sixty million copies worldwide to date. Yet very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was derived from a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of eleven-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner's full story for the very first time. Drawing upon extensive investigations, legal documents, old news stories, public records, and interviews with remaining relatives, Sarah Weinman establishes with authority how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita. As she walks us through Sally's story, Weinman takes us on an intimate and panoramic tour of mid-century America, from Sally's home in Camden, New Jersey, to her place of rescue in California, and back to the East Coast again. The story of Sally Horner echoes the stories of countless girls and women who never had the chance to speak for themselves. By diving deeper in the publication history of Lolita and restoring Sally to her rightful place in the lore of the novel's creation, The Real Lolita casts a new light on the dark inspiration for a modern classic.

Presents a fictionalized portrait of the life of Serey Nabokov, the gay brother of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, and his struggles with his homosexuality and adventures in the salons and clubs of pre-war Europe.

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Dolores Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust. The novel chronicles Humbert's obsession with Lolita and his manipulative and ultimately abusive relationship with her as they travel across the United States. Nabokov's writing in "Lolita" is characterized by its lyrical prose, intricate wordplay, and dark humor, which serves to both captivate and unsettle the reader. Despite its disturbing subject matter, "Lolita" is celebrated for its literary brilliance and has been praised for its exploration of themes such as desire, obsession, and the corruption of innocence. Nabokov challenges readers to confront their own moral judgments and perceptions of love and sexuality through Humbert's unreliable narration. "Lolita" has sparked intense debate and controversy since its publication due to its portrayal of taboo subjects, including pedophilia. However, it's also widely regarded as a masterpiece of literature and continues to be studied and analyzed for its complex narrative structure and psychological depth.

This book makes an important contribution to cultural analysis by opening up the work of two canonical authors to issues of exile and migration. Barbara Straumann's close reading of selected films and literary texts focuses on Speak, Memory, Lolita, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Suspicion, North by Northwest and Shadow of a Doubt and explores the connections between language, imagination and exile. Invoking psychoanalysis as the principal discourse of dislocation, the book not only uses concepts such as 'screen memory', 'family romance', 'fantasy' and 'the uncanny' as hermeneutic foils, it also argues that, in their own ways, the arch-parodists Hitchcock and Nabokov are remarkably in tune with the images and tropes developed by Freud.