The Secret History book tour continues! Coming up next: Minneapolis and Chicago
Thursday, May 2, I’ll be reading from The Secret History at Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Minneapolis/St. Paul’s largest independent bookstore. The event starts at 7:30 pm. I promise not to do the Mary Tyler Moore thing with the hat, because everyone there has probably already seen that at least once or twice. But I am excited about […]
Public Radio International’s “The World” features The Secret History
In case you missed it, last week I got a chance to talk about The Secret History with Marco Werman, host of Public Radio International’s “The World.” We discussed Nabokov’s gift for outrunning history, 20th-century anti-Semitism, and Solzhenitsyn, among other things. At one point, Werman asked about the reception the book is getting, and I somehow ended […]
Mad Men, Nabokov, and more praise for The Secret History
What do Entertainment Weekly, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Netherlands’ Radio One all have in common? They’ve been pondering Nabokov! Writing about Mad Men‘s season premiere, EW‘s Keith Staskiewicz begins with a quote from Nabokov (which, he notes, comes from the era in which the episode is set). The two sentences he includes are taken from […]
Friday reading at Harvard Book Store
If you live in the greater Boston area, be sure to come to Harvard Book Store in Cambridge this Friday at 7:00 pm, when I’ll be reading from (and signing copies of) The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. I’m excited to return to Cambridge, where I was living when I first began my research—and where Nabokov […]
The winner of The Secret History photo contest
Thanks to all of you who sent in pictures of yourselves with your copy of The Secret History! I’ll announce the winner of the drawing (and explain our super-scientific method for choosing) in a moment. But before we get to that, I’d like to share two photos that knocked my socks off even though they […]
The New Republic weighs in on The Secret History
In June 1962 Mary McCarthy wrote what would become perhaps the most famous review ever written of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. In “Bolt from the Blue,” which ran in the pages of The New Republic, McCarthy called the novel a “a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine,” and “one of the very great works of […]
