Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin

While searching for a publisher brave enough to put out Lolita, and laboring under the burden of financial necessity, Vladimir Nabokov published Pnin in installments in The New Yorker, and it has lived in the shadows ever since. It is, admittedly, a much less ambitious […]

Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading

In the Preface to Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov preempts his reader by dismissing any similarities between his novel and the works of Franz Kafka, claiming that, at the time of its composition, he had yet to even read Kafka. By […]