Content Tagged ‘Vladimir Nabokov’

Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory,’ ver. 2.0

January 28, 2011 | 3 Comments

Olga Khotiashova responded to my review of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory by posting as a comment a lovely essay, which I have also featured as a guest post, below; it unites her personal history with her reading of the book and with literary and political analysis. A mathematician by education, she now lives in Houston. Reflections on Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory by a Russian native speaker recently immigrated to the USA By Olga Khotiashova I read the famous Lolita …

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Review: Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’

September 14, 2010 | 11 Comments

Literary artistry and a chilly persona imbue this classic memoir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov. Knopf, 268 pages. “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.” Vladimir Nabokov follows this intriguing precept, which he announces in Speak, Memory, with vigor in the book, fondling the minute sensory and surface …

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For the well-read writer . . .

December 11, 2009 | One Comment

If there’s a writer of any stripe on your holiday gift list, you could do worse than to buy The Paris Review Interviews, Vols. 1-4, a new boxed set that collects the journal’s fifty years of interviews with famous and emerging writers. (Take note, Claire and Tom!) E.B. White (1899–1985), gifted essayist and author of immortal children’s books, sat down for his interview with The Paris Review in 1969. The New Yorker’s great stylist, candid to the point of self-effacement, …

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Richard's books

The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

by David Shields

I loved this inquiry and lament about human mortality, a stealth memoir in which we learn about the author indirectly, mostly in relation to his vibrant, dominating 97-year-old father.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

by Jon Krakauer

For some reason not as engaging to me as Into the Wild but a great account; his spare style failed to help me see the mountain, but by the end I felt its cold. I am troubled by the human costs of the sport, as is Krakauer, who seems perm...

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home

by Mark Richard

A fascinating experiment in point of view: it opens with an overview in distancing third-person; then it becomes a story told in differently distancing second person. His childhood and child self are fascinating. For me, he did not full...

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

by Hal Herzog

As a dog owner, an “animal lover,” and a former farmer, I largely enjoyed Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Author Hal Herzog’s message is simple and clear: humans’ relationship with animals is illogical and emotional. My bona fid...

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

by Vivian Gornick

Gornick’s truths blaze off the page, her portraits of others transfix, her sentences and rhythms delight. What she remembers, she says, of growing up in a Jewish tenement in the Bronx, is a building full of women: "Shrewd, volatile, u...

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