The Original Laura

Dmitri Nabokov just announced that he will not destroy his father's last novel, The Original Laura. Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri's father, left instructions to destroy at his death the 138 index cards that make up the novel. Dmitri, Nabokov's literary executor, after letting the matter rest for thirty years, will likely publish his father's last novel. Nabokov wrote this novel on 3 x 5 index cards in pencil, and died before he could finish it. At the time that he was working on it, his publisher reported that after finishing his index cards, Nabokov planned to "deal himself a novel."

The Grinnell College Libraries have 96 entires in their catalog for Vladimir Nabokov, 28 of which are in Russian. Nabokov's most widely known novel is Lolita. Lolita has been made into movies and has been the foundation for many studies and the inspiration for fiction and nonfiction by other writers, including Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books and Russian composer, Shchedrin's opera Lolita. Click on the following link to read a brief interview with Dmitri Nabokov published in the New York Times on May 4, 2008.

http://tinyurl.com/69bfy6


Find books by Nabokov in the Grinnell College Libraries:

http://cat.lib.grinnell.edu/search/a?SEARCH=nabokov%2C+vladimir+vladimirovich+1899&sortdropdown=-

Human Smoke

Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold, a book in which he takes the library community to task for throwing away printed newspapers (most likely all replaced with microfilm or digital editions) and old books (perhaps less forgivable--depending on the context), has a new book coming out next week from Simon and Schuster. For an interesting article about this book, follow this New York Times "permalink" to the March 4 review by Charles McGrath. During Baker's Double Fold phase, he bought 6000 volumes of bound newspapers from the British Library, which he stored in a warehouse. He has since donated them to Duke University (all explained in the McGrath review). Even more interesting to me, in his review, McGrath describes Baker's research process for writing his new book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Baker made heavy use of the University of New Hampshire libraries and primary sources: newspapers, letters, diaries--all from the 1930s and 1940s. This time he stored his (borrowed) materials in his barn!

For an interesting look at the research process read McGrath's review and when the book comes out, read that too!

Here is the New York Times gloss on the article:

Books
A Debunker on the Road to World War II
By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: March 4, 2008

“Human Smoke” is an unusual book even for Nicholson Baker, whose career has unspooled in a way as unpredictable as one of his fastidiously meandering sentences.

Submitted by Rebecca Stuhr