The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine 'Average Man' party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has done away with individualism a
The famous American poet John Shade was murdered in 1959. This book contains his last poem, Pale Fire, together with a foreword, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor Charles Kinbote. Known
Self-satisfied, delighting in the many fascinating quirks of his own personality, Hermann Hermann is perhaps not to be taken too seriously. But then a chance meeting with a man he believes to be his d
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he
'The illegible signature of teetering disaster' Three great stories--The Aurelian, Signs and Symbols and Lance--the last both a derisive attack on science-fiction and an attempt to imagine the real pa
Written in inimitable, magical prose, these sixty-five stories span Nabokov's extraordinary life and career. Arranged chronologically to illuminate his development as a writer, the collection displays
'Berlin-west, a morning in May.' An aspiring young Berlin actress turns the tables on her lustful middle-aged admirer, in Nabokov's deadpan, deliciously cruel story of hopeless infatuation and horribl
Written in Berlin in 1934, Invitation to a Beheading contains all the surprise, excitement and magical intensity of a work created in two brief weeks of sustained inspiration. It takes us into the fan
A romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle's country estate, in a 'dream-bright' America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are con
Discovering his prodigious gift in boyhood and rising to the rank of International Grandmaster, Luzhin develops a lyrical passion for chess. As he confronts the fiery, swift-swooping Italian Grandmast
In Pale Fire Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreword and commentary by Shade's self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinb
Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nym
Nabokov's comic masterpiece charts the wry, bizarre progress of Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, now precariously perched on a college campus in the fast-beating heart of the USA. A man
An autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov. It presents recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and famil
Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A gen