The central plot features the relationship between two writers: Bradley Pearson, whose severe standards have caused him to suffer from writer's block, and Arnold Baffin, a more facile and popular author, discovered by Pearson. Baffin's...
Literary responses
Angela Carter
Carter herself called this book a juicy, overblown, exploding gothic lollipop.
Turner, Jenny. “A New Kind of Being”. London Review of Books, Vol.
38
, No. 21, pp. 7-14.
11
Lorna Sage
saw it as sceptically exploring Otherness, and demonstrating that escaping patriarchy does not mean escaping mythologies. Linden Peach
commented that after...
Textual Features
Zadie Smith
ZS
set Picnic, Lightning, her second story in The May Anthology of 1997, amid louche society in Paris. She acknowledges the influence of Nabokov
(whose most famous narrator, Humbert Humbert, has a mother...
The essays comprising part one cover such topics as the 1968 student protests in Paris, the writer Marguerite Yourcenar
, and the case of Gabrielle Russier
, while the reviews of part two take...
Timeline
1955
Copies of Molloy by Samuel Beckett
and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
(both published in France) were seized by British Customs.
Iranian academic Azar Nafisi
published Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, a remarkable work of social and political commentary intertwined with and expressed through literary criticism.
Texts
Lermontov, Mikhail Yurevich. “Introduction and Notes”. A Hero of Our Times, translated by. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov, Doubleday, 1958.