Sign up to our emails and be the first to know about new releases, special offers and more.
Become a Readings Member to make your shopping experience even easier. Sign in or sign up for free!
Hello Readings Member! Go to the member centre to view your orders, change your details, or view your lists, or sign out.
Australian Book Retailer of the Year 2021
Vladimir Nabokov
The discovery of chess is for Luzhin the revelation of an order of impeccable harmony in which he takes refuge from his unhappy adolescence and develop a brilliant career as…
Available to order, ships in approx 4 weeksAvailable to order
The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with…
Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crimehis own murder.
One of the best-loved of Nabokov’s novels, Pnin features his funniest character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the…
Here, in a magical parade that walks through the confused universe of Russian exiles, we see Olga. She’s pretty and bored thanks to the cosmic boredom of her suitors; to…
In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects. Strong Opinions offers his trenchant, witty…
‘Look at the harlequins …Play! Invent the world! Invent reality’. This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then…
Available to order, ships in approx 2 weeksAvailable to order
These four plays and the two essays on drama that accompany them were written in Russian during Nabokov’s emigre years in Germany and France, before his published work in English…
Available to order, ships in 7-14 daysAvailable to order
Smurov, a fussily self-conscious Russian tutor, shoots himself after a humiliating beating by his mistress’ husband. Unsure whether his suicide has been successful or not, Smurov drifts around Berlin, observing…
Two appendixes from Nabokov’s famous edition of Eugene Onegin: his study of versification in English and Russian poetry, and his term paper on Pushkin’s Ethiopian ancestor. Originally published in 1965…
The annotated text of this modern classic. It assiduously illuminates the extravagant wordplay and the frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references. Edited with a preface, introduction and notes by Alfred…
This Library of America volume is the first of three volumes presenting the most authoritative versions of the English works of the brilliant Russian emigre, Vladimir Nabokov.
The Real Life…
Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, ‘to fix once for all the perilous…
Linking various minor events, this work switches back-and-forth producing an illusion of impetus.
This is a phantasmal autobiography of Fyodor Gorbunov-Cherdynstev, a writer living in the closed world of Russian intellectuals in Berlin shortly after World War I. The story is of a…
When Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel…
The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine Average Man party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has…
A fastidiously shaped series of lectures based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the Spanish classic. Rejecting the common interpretation of Don Quixote as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work…
Traces the bleak life of Hugh Person through murder, madness, prison and trips to Switzerland. This novel sinks into the transparent things of the world that surround this one Person…
Lev Ganin is a young officer sharing a boarding house in Berlin with a host of Russian emigres. Alone in his room, he dreams of his first love, Mary. Awash…
Vladimir Nabokov's debut novel, Mary, is a well written story about a youthful love.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899 - 2 July 1977), also known by…
The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine ‘Average Man’ party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has…
The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, and Chekhov.
In paperback for the first time, The Enchanter is the precursor to Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous novel, Lolita. At once hilarious and chilling, it is the story of a middle-aged…
The screenplay for Kubrik’s 1962 film tells the story of an older man’s obsession with a young girl.
Nabokov’s first novel is now available in a trade paper edition. Here is the dark tale of a handsome officer who lives next door to his lover’s husband in a…
The protagonist relates the life of his half-brother, the novelist Sebastian Knight, in an effort to reveal his true character.
A novel constructed around the last great poem of a fictional American poet, John Shade, and an account of his death. The poem appears in full and the narrative develops…
An annotated edition of Lolita . It attempts to elaborate on the verbal textures and show how they contribute to the novel’s overall meaning. It also provides observations on the…
In Berlin, there lived a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable and happy but one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress he loved…
Irresistibly ironic, this chilling novel of folly and destruction is about a January to May romance between a sensitive, middle-aged man and a cretinous girl half his age.
Nikolai Gogol was one of the great geniuses of nineteenth century Russian literature, with a command of the irrational unmatched by any writer before or since. His strange tales, though…
An autobiographical volume covering Nabokov’s first 40 years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War II, telling of his emergence as a writer…
Fifty new books at e1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry
‘The illegible signature of teetering disaster’
…
Available to order, ships in 3-5 daysAvailable to order
Nikolai Gogol was the most idiosyncratic of the great Russian novelists of the 19th century and lived a tragically short life which was as chaotic as the lives of the…
A novel that studies the moral disintegration of a man whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him.
Readers meet one of Nabokov’s funniest and most heartrending characters: Timofey Pnin, a professor of Russian at an American college, who lectures in a language he cannot master.
Nabokov’s parody, half poem and half commentary on the poem, deals with the escapades of the deposed king of Zemala in a New England college town.
Originally published by McGraw Hill Book Company in 1969.
Nabokov
Interviews, articles, and editorials from the 1960s and 1970s reveal Nabokov’s personal views on a range of subjects, including art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times.
A chilling story of obsession and madness. Luzhin, a distracted, withdrawn boy, takes up chess as a refuge from everyday life. As he rises to grandmaster, the game of chess…
IN
Simplified Chinese edition of Strong Opinions
Speak, Memory, first published in 1947 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times–as it offers incisive insights…
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965–30 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…
In an unnamed dream country, Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for gnostical turpitude , an imaginary crime that defies definition. After spending his last days in jail…
A collection of poems that includes: The University Poem , A Literary Dinner , Eve , An Evening of Russian Poetry , Tolstoy , as well as verse written on…
