Lolita has been, for decades, a great inspiration to cover designers, and all those great covers inspired architect John Bertram to hold his own cover design contest to see who could best re-imagine Nabokov’s classic. The resulting competition has now inspired a book, coming in August, with a cover by designers Sulki & Min that references a letter Nabokov sent to his American publisher, Walter J. Minton of Putnam, in April 1959 about the cover design for Lolita. “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. If we cannot find that kind of artistic and virile painting, let us settle for an immaculate white jacket (rough texture paper instead of the usual glossy kind), with LOLITA in bold black lettering.” More: An interview with Bertram.
Lolita, Cover Girl
The Swamp of the Non-Reader
Jonathan Gourlay used to read all the time, then one day he stopped. “I knew that I had taken up residence in the swamp of the non-reader. Here is what life is like in that swamp.”
Place Your Bids
“I’ve learnt so much from this profound novelist about nuance, understatement, technique.” Eighteen handwritten homages to Jane Austen by well-known writers are up for auction until tomorrow. Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hilary Mantel, and Ian McEwan are among the authors whose tributes will raise funds for the Royal Society of Literature, reports The Guardian. And read our interview with Curtis Sittenfeld, whose most-recent novel Eligible is the ultimate literary tribute, an adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
100 Days that Changed Canada
Denise Donlon writes on the day MuchMusic rocked the tube. Peter Mansbridge details when baseball player Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. And Conrad Black outlines a train trip by Canada’s first prime minister. Those are but a few of the essays by well-known Canadian personalities in the new book 100 Days That Changed Canada (HarperCollins Canada), now in stores.
New Norman Rush
New Yorker book critic James Wood dropped in on our “Best of the Millennium” piece on Norman Rush’s Mortals and offered this tidbit, “I think [Rush’s] next book — his first to be set in America — will be unlike anything he has written before.”
The Myth of Farmer
In an essay for The Morning News, Matt Evans takes a look at “how an unfinished autobiography and a 1980s biopic turned Frances Farmer, one of cinema’s most radiant stars, into a lobotomized zombie.”
Big Name Fan(fiction)
“On one occasion, my brother had looked over my shoulder, shuddered, and announced to my mother and father that I was reading porn. ‘No, I’m not!’ I replied, but he was right in a way.” Harry/Draco? Ron x Hermione? Confessions of a fanfiction addict.