Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

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.

A kind and well-respected doctor is transformed into a murderous madman by taking a secret drug of his own creation.

The first major Russian novel, A Hero of Our Time was both lauded and reviled upon publication. Its dissipated hero, twenty-five-year-old Pechorin, is a beautiful and magnetic but nihilistic young army officer, bored by life and indifferent to his many sexual conquests. Chronicling his unforgettable adventures in the Caucasus involving brigands, smugglers, soldiers, rivals, and lovers, this classic tale of alienation influenced Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,...

One of the twentieth century's greatest novelists offers his take on the Spanish classic. The author of Lolita and Pale Fire was not only a master of fiction but a distinguished literary critic as well. In this collection of lectures, which he delivered at Harvard in the early 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov shares insights based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes, a timeless classic and one of the most...