Nabokov's first novel written in English is about a great, Russian writer somewhat like Nabokov himself. After his death, his life is being researched by his half-brother, who is ill-equipped for the task but who struggles to understand Sebastian Knight's work, the two major love affairs that governed his life, and other unexpected details that the novelist kept deliberately mysterious. A satire of scholarly biographies, THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT is also an exploration of the creative process.

Nabokov called this his "dreamiest and most poetical" novel--a Kafka-esque tale of a man named Cincinnatus C. who awaits execution for an obscure crime. Increasingly, from prison, the "real world"--which contains his unfaithful wife, the seductive daughter of the prison director, his fellow prisoners, and all his previous life--becomes more and more unreal. Finally, by the time he is executed, Cincinnatus has no commitment to the world at all, and dies leaving nothing behind. This allegory of a police state was written in 1938, toward the end of Nabokov's Berlin exile, when the horrors of fascism were becoming impossible to ignore.

Volume One of a three-volume set that includes all the fiction and nonfiction Nabokov wrote while in America, along with notes and chronology by Brian Boyd.

Vladimir Nabokov's notorious, hilarious erotic murder mystery takes the form of a monologue by his hero, Humbert Humbert, as he attempts to justify his love for and obsession with the barely adolescent Dolores Haze, known as Lolita. Humbert's cross-country flight with his adored nymphet ends with her betrayal of him with his rival, the evil Quilty, who pursues Lolita not out of love but out of lust and selfishness, and who functions as a kind of double for the more pure-hearted (if perverse) Humbert. Some critics see Humbert (who, like Nabokov, was a European émigré) and Lolita (the quintessentially vulgar American) as personifications of the Old and New Worlds, one corrupting the other (but which?). One of the astonishing aspects of Nabokov's masterpiece is his dazzling command of English, including puns and wordplay worthy of Joyce. Another is the novel's famously checkered publishing history: LOLITA was rejected, banned, censored, and published underground, and it remained unpublished in the US until 1958.

In this very short novel, Hugh Person is an American who makes four trips to Switzerland representing the publisher he works for. During the first, his father dies, and in subsequent visits things go from bad to worse. He becomes involved in a complicated love affair, a farcical murder by a sleepwalker, and a disastrous fire. Eventually, we discover that the narrator of these events is a dead man, the ex-stepfather of Person's beloved. Nabokov's dreamlike novel is not one of his most celebrated or well-known, and it was almost universally misunderstood when it was published in 1972--the reviews, Nabokov commented, "oscillat[ed] between hopeless adoraton and helpless hatred," but it is considered by Nabokovians to be on a par with LOLITA and PNIN.

Nabokov wrote eight plays between 1923 and 1938, including THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN (a verse drama in five acts), THE EVENT (which was produced in Russian in Paris), and THE WALTZ INVENTION.

A true-crime story of Danny Starrett, a handsome husband and father who was a pillar of his community--and a serial killer. In this book, his mother tries to understand how she could have brought up a son who committed horrific crimes.