The books that I love:
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous by Royston Lambert.
Epigrams by Marcus Valerius Martial
The Satyricon by Petronius
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd
Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann
La Canne de Jaspe by Henri de Regnier
The City and The Pillar by Gore Vidal
Cabbala by Thornton Wilder
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov
The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
The Ministry of Fear by Grahame Greene
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Possessed by Dostoevsky
The Gambler by Dostoevsky
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontё
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
And again many great and not so great writers: Chekhov, Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham, Marlowe, Martial, Plato, Petronius, John Dickson Carr, Rex Stout.
What is your favorite book?
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Literature. That’s what I want to talk about.
…Talking of modern day literature, lately I’ve finished reading the book “What a Carve Up!” by Jonathan Coe. The book is interesting, no-ordinary and all that, though I don’t understand an author who kills his main character. I read books by Stephen Fry when I can find them. My favorite English writers are Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham and Agatha Christie. To all the detective stories lovers I highly recommend the good thriller “I Kill” by Giorgio Faletti that I read recently; the title of the book may be other in English translation.
V. Nabokov on writing:
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual”.
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist”.
“To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute”.
“Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash”.
“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by the real beast was quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature”. ("Good Readers and Good Writers")
"I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor's child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy". ("The Art of Literature and Commonsense")
«…Thus, being a young boy, in the nature I found the complicated and “useless” which afterwards I looked for in another delightful dupery--art».
*Revue_Blanche presents*
Mr. Nabokov and his wife:
