Audiobooks by Vladimir Nabokov

La primera edicion de Lolita apareció en París en 1955, publicada por Olympia Press, una editorial con acreditada gama de pornográfica. La novela fue prohibida en Francia y en Inglaterra, y hasta tres años más tarde no pudo publicarse en Estados Unidos. Aunque enseguida fue muy alabada por escritores como Lionel Trilling y Graham Greene, los adjetivos de «escandalosa», «inmoral», «decadente» y «ultrajante» acompañaron largo tiempo a Lolita, actualmente ya considerada como una obra maestra indiscutible de la literatura universal. La historia de la obsesión de Humbert Humbert, un profesor cuarentón, por la doceañera Lolita es una extraordinaria novela de amor en la que intervienen dos componentes explosivos: la atracción «perversa» por las nínfulas y el incesto. Un itinerario a través de la locura y la muerte, que desemboca en una estilizadísima violencia, narrado, a la vez con autoironía y lirismo desenfrenado, por el propio Humbert Humbert. Lolita es también un retrato ácido y visionario de los Estados Unidos, de los horrores suburbanos y de la cultura del plástico y del motel. En resumen, una exhibición deslumbrante de talento y humor a cargo de un escritor que confesó que le hubiera encantado filmar los picnics de Lewis Carrol. «Ningún amante ha pensado en su amada con tanta ternura, ninguna mujer ha sido tan embelesadamente evocada, con tanta gracia y delicadeza, como Lolita» (Lionel Trilling). «La tragedia más divertida desde la Hécuba de Eurípides» (Howard Nemerov). «No es en absoluto pornográfico. Es un divertidísimo libro de anagramas» (W. H. Auden). «La obra más satisfactoria -quizá la única satisfactoria- de la literatura erótica que haya leído... Mientras nuestro siglo entra en sus años finales, la última carcajada puede ser la mejor de todas: la Gran Novela Americana fue escrita por un ruso» (Alan Levy).

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Mario Gas (Narrator)

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The Greatest Russian Stories of Crime and Suspense

A collection of the greatest Russian crime and mystery fiction-including stories by Akunin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Nabokov, Pushkin, and Tolstoy. Many of the greatest Russian authors, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Pushkin, produced crime and mystery fiction, a type of literature that was largely suppressed during the Soviet era because it did not glorify the state, but rather, gave significance to individual characters. With the fall of the Soviet Union, mystery writers have become some of the most successful novelists in Russia, and there is a renewed interest in, and appreciation of, the great crime classics of an earlier era. There have been few policemen, and virtually no private detectives or amateur sleuths, in Russian history worthy of approbation, and in consequence its literature is dramatically different from its Western counterparts. Criminals in Mother Russia tend to be caught or punished by their own consciences or by ghosts, and the notion of a criminal trial as we know it is utterly alien. Nonetheless, the enormous talent and passion of Russian authors has long been justly acclaimed, and the rare forays they made into the loosely defined genre of mystery fiction rank among the world's classics. This volume is the first collection ever devoted entirely to Russian crime fiction.

Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov, Boris Akunin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Bj Harrison (Narrator)

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Selected Poems

These masterly poems span the whole of Nabokov's career from "Music," written in 1914, to the short, playful "To Vera," composed in 1974. The works are newly translated by Dmitiri Nabokov, and include "The University Poem," an extraordinary autobiographical poem in which Nabokov recalls his life in Cambridge, with its crooked alleys and age-old gates, teas at the vicar;s and British girls. Included to are such poems as "To Russia" ("Will you leave me alone! I implore you!), the enchanting "Eve," and verse about America, sport, love, and poetry itself.

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Christopher Lane (Narrator)

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Transparent Things

"Transparent Things revolves around four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland. . . . As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to New York with his bride. . . . Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past. . . . The several strands of dream, memory, and time [are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, more centrally, against the world of observable objects." - Martin Amis One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." - John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Christopher Lane (Narrator)

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Look at the Harlequins!

As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov's last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899), whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, though the two are not to be confused (?). Focusing on the central figures of his life - his four wives, his books, and his muse, Dementia - the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life's work and his life itself, as the worlds of reality and literary invention grow increasingly indistinguishable. One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "One of the greatest masters of prose since Conrad." - Harper's

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

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Ada, or Ardor

Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov's seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom. One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." - John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Arthur Morey (Narrator)

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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer's half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes " I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows." One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Witty and sad at the same time. Profound and dazzling." - Chicago Sun-Times

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Luke Daniels (Narrator)

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The Gift

The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself. One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." - John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Stefan Rudnicki (Narrator)

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Despair

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - thirty years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. "A beautiful mystery plot, not to be revealed." - Newsweek One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." - John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Christopher Lane (Narrator)

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Laughter in the Dark

Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s. One of the twentieth century's master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." - John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Luke Daniels (Narrator)

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The Eye

Nabokov's fourth novel, The Eye is as much a farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov, a lovelorn, excruciatingly self-conscious Russian émigré living in pre-war Berlin, commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer even greater indignities in the afterlife as he searches for proof of his existence among fellow émigrés who are too distracted to pay him any heed. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." - John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Fred Stella (Narrator)

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Glory

Glory is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a twenty-two-year-old Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Convinced that his life is about to be wasted and hoping to impress his love, he decides to embark upon a "perilous, daredevil project" - an illegal attempt to reenter the Soviet Union, from which he and his mother had fled in 1919. He succeeds - but at a terrible cost. "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." - John Updike

Vladimir Nabokov (Author), Luke Daniels (Narrator)

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