Think, Write, Speak
Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor
-
- 10,99 €
-
- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
'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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The more than 150 essays, interviews, and letters collected in this volume, some translated from the Russian for the first time, serve as an illuminating complement to Nabokov's 1973 nonfiction roundup, Strong Opinions. Spanning the years 1921 to 1977 and drawn from sources as diverse as the New Republic, Sports Illustrated, and journals for Europe's Russian migr community, they show the author to have been strongly opinionated on matters that run the gamut from literary style, to his discoveries as an amateur lepidopterist or the cultural impact of his controversial novel Lolita. Nabokov is passionate in his assessment of literary favorites such as Pushkin, whose work he praises for "its ample and powerful lyricism," and bluntly critical of most Soviet literature, which he derides as propagandistic "village dreadful fantasies." His incisive wit and intellectual honesty are also evident in his responses to interviewers' repetitive questions about the scandal caused by Lolita. Nabokov observed, "I write what I like and some like what I write," and his fans will find much to like here.
