Professor Timofey Pnin, late of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously perched at the heart of an American campus. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of [...]

A man at his desk is interrupted by the appearance of a woodland elf in his room; the piano maestro Bachmann ends his career; a barber shaves the face of a man who once tortured him; and a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil. In these sixty-five stories of magic and melancholy, Nabokov displays [...]

In "The Eye", a fussily self-conscious Russian tutor shoots himself after a humiliating beating by his mistress' husband. There follows a satirical detective story and a wonderfully layered exploration of identity, appearance and the loss of self in a world of word-play and confusion. Nabokov descri[...]

The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, "Pale Fire", is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - an[...]

The darkly comic "Transparent Things", one of Nabokov's final books, traces the bleak life of Hugh Person through murder, madness, prison and trips to Switzerland. One of these was the last journey his father ever took; on another, having been sent to ingratiate himself with a distinguished novelist[...]

As a teenage vampire, Vlad has spent the last four years trying to handle the pressures of school while sidestepping a slayer out for his blood. Now he's a senior, and in this final, action-packed book in the series, Vlad must confront the secrets of the past, unravel the mystery of who he really is[...]

A series of seminal technological revolutions has led to a new generation of electronic devices miniaturized to such tiny scales where the strange laws of quantum physics come into play. There is no doubt that, unlike scientists and engineers of the past, technology leaders of the future will have t[...]

In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' All of Nabokov's novels contain scenes of games: chess, scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of[...]

Vladimir Jankelevitch was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century philosophy. In The Bad Conscience - published in 1933 and subsequently revised and expanded - Jankelevitch lays the foundations for his later work, Forgiveness, grappling with the conditions that give rise to the moral[...]