Stalking Nabokov
Full details for this title
| Interest Age |
Young Adults |
| Reading Age |
Young Adults |
| Library of Congress |
Authors, Russian - 20th century, Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich - Criticism and interpretation |
| NBS Text |
Literary Criticism |
| ONIX Text |
College/higher education |
|
| Number of Pages |
464 |
| Dimensions |
Width: 152mm
Height: 229mm
Spine: 38mm |
| Weight |
454g |
|
| Dewey Code |
891.734 |
| Catalogue Code |
225444 |
Description of this Book
At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote an essay on Vladimir Nabokov that the author called brilliant. In 1991, after gaining exclusive access to the writer's archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, that has become standard reading. This collection features essays written by Boyd after completing Nabokov's biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations. This volume forms the perfect companion for readers of Nabokov, approaching the author from a variety of angles and perspectives.
Boyd confronts Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, or affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokov's best English-language work: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokov's metaphysics, Boyd in fact downplays their importance, instead emphasizing the author's humor, reinvention of narrative possibility, and psychological renderings of various characters to unlock the greater mysteries. Reading Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd further immortalizes his far-reaching, versatile talents.
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Awards & Reviews
| NZ Review |
<p>This book is a real treasure. It represents a considerable range of work by the author of one of the great biographies of the late twentieth century, who is also a lucid and consistently engaged and engaging critic. A remarkable read--all readers and scholars of Nabokov will need this book.--Michael Wood, Princeton University |
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Author's Bio
Brian Boyd is University Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland. His work on American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand, and Russian literature, from epics to comics, has appeared in seventeen languages and has won awards on four continents. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, books on Pale Fire and Ada, and the enormous AdaOnline. He has edited Nabokov's English fiction, autobiography, butterfly writings, and verse translations and is now editing a collection of the author's letters to his wife. Also known for his evolutionary and cognitive work, he is the author of On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction and the forthcoming Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare's Sonnets and is coeditor of Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. He is currently working on a biography of the philosopher Karl Popper.
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