As conscientious writers know, punctuation can make all the difference in a sentence, sculpting mush into meaning or cluing the reader in to nuances of intonation. Vulture’s Kathryn Schulz has…
“When Nabokov started translating [his English-language memoir] into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in…
A few weeks before Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita came out, the New Yorker published a short story about a man consorting with a young woman named Lolita instead of her mother—but this story…
Sibling rivalry takes many forms. Whether it’s Bart and Lisa Simpson choking each other in front of the television or Cain concussing his brother Abel the outcome is usually the…
Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson academically quarrel in a series of letters, written to assuage the pain of illness that was afflicting them both. They’ve got a shared “literary curiosity,”…
“Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate”, as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die…