In which McSweeney’s and I jinx Evgeni Nabokov
If you’re out there reading this, Evgeni Nabokov, I’m very, very sorry. Though you don’t really have anything directly to do with The Secret History, I thought it would be fun to write something about the fact that you, the New York Islanders’ goalie, share a last name with Vladimir Nabokov. Given that the Islanders […]
Registration opens for June Secret History event at the Smithsonian
This week I’ll be in Chicago (the Book Cellar, May 3) and Minneapolis (Magers & Quinn, May 2). But I wanted to post a quick note to let mid-Atlantic readers know that registration has opened for my next book event, on Thursday, June 6 at the Smithsonian Associates program in Washington, DC. The June DC talk […]
Brain Pickings and Star Tribune review The Secret History
In case you missed it earlier this week, Maria Popova of Brain Pickings wrote up The Secret History for Nabokov’s birthday. Popova focuses on the point in the book when Nabokov arrives in America in the midst of World War II, with all the attendant bureaucracy and anxiety over threats to national security. Along the way she also […]
Happy birthday, Nabokov! What does the FBI have on you?
When is Vladimir Nabokov’s birthday anyway? Depending on where you look, you’ll see April 10, April 22, and April 23 listed, but which is it? The answer is… all three. As Nabokov explains in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he was born in Russia in 1899 on April 10, but at that point in time Russia […]
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 […]
Remembering Ardis: a note from Fred Moody
[The first in a series of guest posts on Nabokov and history.] When I first heard about the forthcoming publication of The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, I pre-ordered the Kindle version immediately. I was hugely curious about the book, as I humbly thought I knew pretty much everything there was to know about Nabokov’s […]
